By contrast, Starbucks is governed by the idea that people make choices—in their coffee, their milk, their sweetener—and that the more choices people have, the greater satisfaction they feel. (And in just those simple choices, you can see the unpredictability of the consumers—some are avoiding caffeine, fat, or sugar, and others are happily ordering them all.) Starbucks is successful because it can be all things to all people—it makes no bets on one set of choices over another.

  Whereas in the Ford economy, the masses were served by many people working to make one, uniform product, in the Starbucks economy, the masses are served by a few people working to make thousands of customized, personalized products.

  The Starbucks model seems to be winning. iPods are popular not because we can carry around music—we could do that with the Walkman in the 1980s. They are popular because they let us pick and choose our own songs. Personal technology has become personalized technology, and now we can have exactly what we want in almost every consumer area. You can even have a made-to-order car delivered in less than a month—longer than it takes to get a pizza, but still an amazing feat made possible by technology.

  The triumph of personalization and choice is a boon for coffee-drinkers and car-buyers, but it’s a nightmare for trend-spotters. As choices get more and more finely sliced, you have to look all the harder to see how choices change.

  But remember the terrorists, or realize that the best-selling car in America is bought by barely 300,000 people. Unlike any other time in history, small trends can make a big difference. So while it is harder than ever to spot trends, it is also more important.

  Small groups, drawn together by shared needs, habits, and preferences, are on the rise. They are powerful, and they are hard to find. This book aims to pin some of them down.

  The Power of Numbers

  There have been some very good books in recent years that claim that America is moving in a couple of big directions. This book contends the opposite. America is moving in hundreds of small directions. At once. Quickly. It’s part of our great energy and part of our looming challenge.

  Because small trends pay very little deference to one another. For every high-profile group of young, urban chic in America, there is another group of older, old-fashioned churchgoers. For every group of Gadget Geeks, there are the people who say turn the technology off. Americans are dieting more than ever, but the steak houses have never been more full. Politics is split to the extremes with “red states” and “blue states,” but there have never been more voters who call themselves Independent.

  For thirty years since reading V. O. Key, I have used the most reliable device I know of to spot trends, or the shifts and evolutions in these groups: numbers. Americans claim to be a “gut” nation—which is kind of a bodily metaphor for what we roughly term our “values.” How many times do you hear that the right thing to do is to follow your gut?

  Most of the time, though, that advice is pretty lousy. If you want the safest form of transportation, get on a plane; don’t go near a car. If you want to lose weight, count calories; forget the cranberry juice and flaxseed. Numbers will almost always take you where you want to go if you know how to read them.

  In general we love numbers—a hit TV show these days is even called Numb3rs. But we also fear them. In part because we’re less well trained in math and science than we are in language and literature. As a country, we suspect we’re not that good at numbers. They scare us, almost as much as public speaking. At the same time they fascinate us.

  Many of us have a healthy mistrust of numbers, because some people, in an effort to advance an agenda, misuse them. Do you remember the Y2K scare? Every computer-user on earth worried that their files were in jeopardy as the millennium turned over. In fact, only one-third of the world’s computers were ever even susceptible to Y2K errors—and in those, hardly any problems materialized. Or avian flu. In late 2005, it sped around the world that out of 140 or so human cases of avian flu reported in Southeast Asia, more than half had resulted in death. Reporters somberly concluded that the mortality rate for avian flu is more than 50 percent. Terrifying! But in fact the sample those numbers came from was only the very sickest people. People who contracted the flu and never went to the hospital never even made it into the calculations. I call these reported numbers “scaretistics.”

  My job, in thirty years as a pollster, has been to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to numbers. In working for different kinds of clients, from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates to Tony Blair, I have learned to pierce through remarkably stubborn conventional wisdom, finding counterintuitive trends in society that can help solve substantial challenges. Imagine for a moment that you are a powerful leader. Eloquent advocates tug at you every day, and the press gives you its opinions. Your advisers chime in. It becomes hard to make the right choice unless you also have the missing ingredient: the numbers. My job was to wade through all the opinions and offer a solid, quantitative view of reality based on the numbers, so that leaders had a true picture when they made their decisions. In my view, words without numbers are as meaningless as numbers without words—you need the right balance, so that eloquent arguments are backed up by reality as depicted by numbers. Later in the book, we talk about rising crime in America—a very difficult subject that has been the focus of countless treatises and theories on everything from unemployment to permissive parenting. But when you understand that the number of felons being released from jail has lately escalated to 650,000 people a year, you instantly have a model of a new threat on the streets and are pointed to a new set of solutions.

  In my role as pollster and strategist, I have helped generate winning counterintuitive strategies that follow the numbers. Going after the Soccer Moms in 1996. Helping soon-to-be Senator Hillary Clinton in 2000 look for votes in upstate New York, where Democrats had not traditionally found many. Breaking the mold on advertising for companies by having them pitch their ads to older people, not young ones. Advising the winners of fifteen foreign presidential elections in languages I could not even pronounce, let alone understand, because I stuck to the numbers and not local biases. Often, people are just too close to the situation to see the real facts—and it takes an objective look to tell them what is really going on. Leaders can be even more isolated, often captive to their staffs, and hearing only what local journalists say is going on. Numbers can cut to the chase in any language.

  I remember one day telling the new president of Colombia that his people were ready for an all-out war on drugs by an overwhelming percentage. They did not, as most people thought, want to turn a blind eye but wanted to modernize the country. The president was silent on the matter—but finally his chief of staff said, “Mark, you are right, but we would all be killed.” He taught me the limits of the numbers that day, but eventually both that president and the country did decide to make war on the drug lords, and risk their lives in the process.

  This book is about the power of numbers and how they drive America and the world. Rarely are things what they seem on the surface, and nonquantitative, conventional wisdom is usually not wisdom at all. Hidden right in front of us are powerful counterintuitive trends that can be used to drive a new business, run a campaign, start a movement, or guide your investment strategy. Even though these trends are staring us in the face, we often don’t really see them.

  Trend Spotters in Context

  I am part of a proud line of trend-spotters. Alvin Toffler, who wrote the Future Shock series, and John Naisbitt, who wrote Megatrends, were some of the first thinkers in the modern era to look at the huge, changing world of human behavior and try to make some sense of it with facts and data. They got it right that the Information Age would change everything.

  But one thing in particular that it changed was the nature of looking at trends themselves. As we’ll see throughout this book, you can’t understand the world anymore only in terms of “megatrends,” or universal experiences. In today’s splintered society, if you want to operate successfully, you have to understand the intense identity groups that are growing and moving, fast and furious in crisscrossing directions. That is microtrends.

  It is very different, however, from what most people do when they “spot trends”—which is itself a growing trend. Lately there is something of a cottage industry of marketers and sociologists who will tell you the Ten or Fifteen Things You Must Know to get through the next two or five or ten years. They define and refine the world around them with ever cuter and cleverer names for the consumer, cultural, and personal changes going on in society. Yes, I aim for some sticky labels in this book, too. But in this book, a trend is not merely a “development,” like the declining use of cash. It is not simply a “shift” in how people do things, like more women taking their husband’s name. It is not just an evolving “preference” for a product or activity, like the growing use of GPS systems. A microtrend is an intense identity group, that is growing, which has needs and wants unmet by the current crop of companies, marketers, policymakers, and others who would influence society’s behavior.

  Diving In

  In Microtrends, we will look at seventy-five groups who, by virtue of their daily decisions, are forging the shape of America and the world both today and tomorrow. While some groups are larger than others, what they have in common is that they are relatively unseen—either because their actual numbers are small or because conventional wisdom hides their potential in the shadows, sometimes even emphasizing the exact opposite.

  In some of the groups, you will see yourself or your friends, your clients or your constituents. Some groups will seem wildly remote. Some funny. Others tragic. Occasionally, I have documented diametrically opposing trends. Taken together, they are a kind of impressionist painting of America and the world.

  At the end, we’ll take a step back and look at the portrait. No longer the sum of a few master strokes, America and the world are now a collection of fine dots, to be examined one by one. We’ll see what image emerges at the end, and what it means for our future.

  PART I

  Love, Sex, and Relationships

  Sex-Ratio Singles

  There is perhaps no feeling more acute than being left out. Everyone remembers what it felt like not to be picked for a sports team, or to be excluded from a friends’ night out, or to be the only one not invited to a wedding. What compounds the angst, of course, is the injustice—why me? I am a better ballplayer, a more loyal friend, a more gregarious guest—and yet I’m the one left out.

  In today’s world, more and more women are finding themselves left out of the institution of marriage. Some opt out deliberately, but others fill up the dating Web sites, only to be disappointed. Many blame themselves, wondering what went wrong.

  The truth is, there is nothing wrong with single women that a few more heterosexual men wouldn’t fix. In the Wild West 150 years ago, there were too few women, so they had to import brides. Today, we have the opposite problem. There are too few straight men for all the straight women, and so women are unexpectedly caught in a game of musical chairs—in which at least 3 percent of them are going to be left standing.

  In 1994, a National Opinion Research Center study on “The Social Organization of Sexuality” found that 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women said they had engaged in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty. Another study by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that 6.2 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women reported a same-sex partner in the previous three years. A third study reported that 9 percent of men and 5 percent of women who had had at least one homosexual experience said those experiences could be described as “frequent” or “ongoing.”

  What these studies suggest is that whatever the actual number of gay people may be, gay men outnumber lesbians in America by approximately 2 to 1. Numerically speaking, when the music stops in heterosexual America, there are a lot of women left standing.

  Which means that for the first time in America, there are more single women than ever who are likely to stay that way.

  Source: U.S. Census, 2006

  Here’s how the numbers play out.

  At birth, girls have it pretty good. There are 90,000 more boys born every year than girls, setting up a favorable dating ratio. But by the time those kids turn 18, the sex ratio has shifted a full point the other way to 51 to 49, because more boys die in puberty than girls. (Researchers call it a “testosterone storm,” which causes more deaths among boys from car accidents, homicides, suicides, and drownings.)

  As though that wasn’t bad enough—socially speaking, for heterosexual women—the Gay Factor then kicks in. Assuming that about 5 percent of U.S. adults are gay (as experts claim, and polls bear out), there are something like 7.5 million gay men and 3.5 million lesbians in America. If you subtract them from the already lopsided numbers of overall men and women, you get something like 109 million straight women to 98 million straight men—for a straight sex ratio of 53 to 47.

  It is even worse for black women. Setting aside the gay factor (which doesn’t actually move the black adult sex ratio, since the number of black adults is relatively small), the gender ratio in the black adult community already starts out at 56 to 44, due to the high rates of death among black teenage boys. Then the relatively high incarceration rate of black men—4,700 for every 100,000 black men, compared to only 347 for every 100,000 black women—moves that ratio another point, to 57 to 43. Factor in gender gaps in college education on top of that, and it’s no surprise that many black women, especially the more successful they are, are single.

  It is always possible that there are more lesbians that appear in the surveys that we reviewed. On the other hand, the studies seem to suggest that even if women experiment with lesbianism, they less often choose it as their permanent lifestyle.

  We all know that because men die about four years earlier than women, there are far more widows than widowers. But clearly the gender imbalance happens much earlier, too—in the dating years—yet because there has not been sufficient attention to that fact, women too often blame themselves for events that are statistically beyond their control.

  Some effects of Sex-Ratio Singles are already evident. In 2005, single women were the second-largest group of home-buyers, just behind married couples. They bought nearly 1.5 million homes that year, more than twice as many as single men. Though it would have been unheard of fifty years ago, American women are now regularly buying homes and building equity before they are buying bridesmaids gifts and building families.

  A related trend, given the rise of single women, is the number of women bearing or adopting children without a partner—known as Single Mothers by Choice. When the TV character Murphy Brown decided to have a child without a husband in the early 1990s, it was still radical enough to have Vice President Dan Quayle dress her down in what may have been his most famous speech ever (and perhaps the only one by a vice president to engage a fictional character in debate). But at that time, there were only about 50,000 such Moms in America. Now there are an estimated three times that many.

  It is possible that the unfavorable straight sex ratio, discouraging as it is for women in some respects, has encouraged women to excel elsewhere. As we’ll see in the trend on Wordy Women, young women outnumber young men in fields like law, public relations, and journalism. Women outvoted men 54 to 46 percent in the 2004 presidential election. Women outnumber men in college by about 57 to 43 percent.

  Of course, the greatest beneficiaries of the women who are Sex-Ratio Singles are straight men, who—frankly—have never had it so good. Women who wouldn’t give them the time of day in college start noticing, eight or ten years later, that there are measurably fewer men in play than there used to be. Suddenly, the balding guy with the solid job, and the reasonably good fatherhood potential, starts looking kind of hot.

  And there are more commercial and political implications as well. Home maintenance, home repair, and home security companies have an enormous new market to attend to in single women. How long until Merrill Lynch appreciates the power of single women investing and retiring alone—and changes its trademark logo, the testosterone-charged bull—into something more graceful?

  If women actually want husbands as much as they want houses, will we someday have mail-order husbands—importing them to Trenton and Tuscaloosa the way we once sent brides to the Wild West?

  If women don’t want the husbands that badly—but they do still want the children—there is a nearly limitless market for sperm donation, and all the financial and ethical regulations that will come with it.

  Historians have well documented that a society with too many unattached men leads to war. Will a society with too many unattached women lead to peace?

  Cougars

  Women Who Date Younger Men

  Every era in pop culture reinvents the titillating affair between the older woman and the younger man. The Graduate in 1967, in which the worldly Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson of Simon and Garfunkel fame) seduces the naive Dustin Hoffman. How Stella Got Her Groove Back in 1996, Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel about a successful stockbroker mother who finds unexpected romance with a young Jamaican islander. Something’s Gotta Give in 2003, in which 50-something Diane Keaton dates 30-something Keanu Reeves (before settling on Jack Nicholson).

  But what started out as scandalous, and then became intriguing, has now become downright ordinary.

  Older men seeking younger trophy wives is an age-old phenomenon. “Dirty old man” is a universal cliché. But now in America, women’s growing financial and sexual independence have made them, too, increasingly interested in younger dates. According to a 2003 study by the AARP, one in three women between 40 and 69 is dating a younger man, and about one-quarter of those men are ten or more years younger.