When Greek philosophers first tried to explain natural change in the world, they were stumped until Democritus, in about 460 BC, proposed the theory that the world was made up of atoms—small but distinct particles whose mix determined the state and character of matter. Many disagreed; even Aristotle was his chief critic. But over time, Democritus was proven right. In fact, even the most solid mass turns out to be made of billions of invisible atoms that determine its character.

  As any high school student knows, change the mix of atoms just slightly and you will get profound effects on the strength of steel, the shine of diamonds, or the radioactivity of enriched uranium. This analogy reflects the underlying theory of Microtrends—our culture today is increasingly the product of what I have identified as societal atoms—small trends that reflect changing habits and choices. They are often hard to identify, but I have tried to provide a kind of periodic table of trends in the major areas of everyday life. Very slight changes in the mix of the cultural atoms will trigger profound changes in the shape of our globe and the character of our society.

  Most people today make judgments much more as Aristotle did—looking holistically at events from their own point of view. But unlike Aristotle, they often claim to see the forest without having truly examined the trees. And especially in today’s world of the quick post, they increasingly make judgments based on their own worldview rather than the underlying facts, which they view as hard to determine. The simple truth is that most of the time we can’t see the true patterns of people’s lives, except through statistics, and yet we claim to understand them based instead on our own limited viewpoints. The tendency then is for conventional wisdom to be both very dogmatic and very wrong.

  I have found over the years that there is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs. Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy primarily through the eyes of the national media. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency based on worries about the economy, the statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth. Attitudes had been most negative at a time the economy was actually turning around.

  In 1995, when I was working with President Clinton, Pat Buchanan got on the cover of TIME and Newsweek trumpeting the ideas that the economy was going down the tubes and no new good jobs were being created. We were becoming a nation of hamburger-flippers, he said, to nodding journalists. I asked the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to look into it, and he found that people actually were getting good New Economy jobs, led by the software sector. In his 1996 State of the Union speech, President Clinton said we had the best economy in thirty years—a statement that sent a flurry of reporters to check actual statistics rather than popular political movements and sweeping, politically motivated statements. The more people looked at the facts, the more they agreed, and six months later, there was near-unanimity that the economy was in great shape. Had the economy changed? No, what had changed was knowledge about the true facts of the economy. When people looked at the actual trees, their view of the forest changed.

  I learned from this that an average person cannot tell the difference between 4 percent unemployment and 8 percent unemployment. If you have 100 friends, and a few more are employed or unemployed, you can’t accurately gauge whether the economy is going up or down. If twenty of them were unemployed, you could; in other words, you can easily see firsthand the complete disasters and depressions. But you can’t see the changes in the normal range of most statistics. You can’t really see the difference between an economic boom and a recession, which would be the difference between 4 and 8 percent unemployment.

  So for most subjects, people rely on a combination of news shows, Web sites, magazines, radio, chatter with friends, and their own gut. And given how unscientific almost all of those sources are, most people end up being wrong much of the time about what is actually going on. They are influenced by what looks right, and by what they want to see. They rarely take the time to look at the cold hard facts of what is happening.

  I invite you to undertake some trend-spotting of your own at www.microtrending.com. I have given you a head start with the seventy-five in this book, and no doubt you have spotted several of your own as you read it and it triggered some recollection of trends you have observed. In this book, I have tried to show how by focusing on the facts and the numbers, you can see almost a parallel universe—generally hidden, and yet staring us right in the face. Almost everything in the book has come from publicly available sources; it’s all out there for anyone to look at. And a look at the numbers suggests that more people should look at the numbers more often. They are the tea leaves for understanding the changes in society. Maybe Alexis de Tocqueville could understand us from firsthand observation back when America was small and young, but today he would probably not be sending back the right dispatches.

  We are undergoing massive change in contradictory ways—a society that is fundamentally older, yet working more; a society that is striving to be healthier, and yet has never had higher obesity or caffeine consumption; a society that is increasingly discussing politicians’ style and personality, and yet is more educated than ever before.

  And the world itself is undergoing some very counterintuitive changes: As science becomes more important, we have had a rise in religion; as economic freedom and capitalism are winning out, democracy and human rights are lagging; societies that give the greatest encouragement to childbearing are showing some of the greatest population declines.

  The new laws of trends are coming into focus. For every trend, there is a countertrend. For every push to modernization, there is a drive to hold on to old values. For every dash to the Internet, there are those who want to knit and seek peace and quiet. For every rush to have instant information, there are people who want it long, detailed, and thoughtful. For every surge in homes without kids, there is a surge in homes with pets.

  Microtrends reflects the human drive toward individuality, while conventional wisdom often seeks to drive society toward the lowest common denominator. As I said at the start, we have seen the original Ford economy literally replaced by the Starbucks economy—the multiplication of choice as the driver of personal expression and satisfaction.

  Some trends are big and obvious, and affect most of us. But more and more, what is shaping the world is a series of powerful desires and forces that are hidden, operating just under the surface. And in those forces are the seeds of unexpected changes. They explain why the tolerance of war and conflict are on the decline; why economic freedom appears to be irrepressible; and why we are suddenly seeing acceptances of lifestyles and marriages that for thousands of years were bitterly opposed and blocked.

  Movements get started by small groups of dedicated, intensely interested people. That is why the al Qaeda model of organization, and the focus on the number of terrorist converts, is critical. Winning movements are not necessarily majority movements, but they have drive and intensity behind them. Ten people with bazookas can overcome 1,000 people with picket signs, but they can’t overcome 10,000 people with picket signs. This is the magic of the 1 percent threshold, and the potential of microtrends to be at the center of changing the world.

  Many of the trends covered in this book have been fun—but almost all of them have a serious side to them. Pro-Semitism may have its funny side, what with ethnic jokes about finding a spouse who is good at making reservations, but it also represents the tumbling of thousands of years of barriers. Pets becoming the new children may drive up silk dog-bed sales, but it will also fundamentally change people’s attitudes toward animals and how we treat them. Sun-Haters may look silly in their long sleeves on the beach, but they could reorient how we regard the outdoors, recreation, and environmental policy. If people are becoming their own doctors, they are going to be a handful when they encounter their real doctors, and lives are going to be lost when these DIY Docs commit “malpractice.”

  Will young people’s interest in activities like knitting signal a return to some of the basics—people getting a chance to make something with their own hands? Or will their interest in becoming snipers lead to more criminal acts of cowardice? Or might it change how we look at warfare altogether?

  And clearly, with High School Moguls on the one end and Working Retired on the other, people are looking to work more at both ends of their life—for all the talk of the preciousness of time with kids and family, Americans are flocking more to the rewards of work and less to the rewards of family. Hence, the explosion in the number of single households.

  While there is a wave of interest in religion, people around the world are gravitating toward smaller churches and newer religious sects. Some older religions are trying to modernize, reforming their doctrine and adding women to the pulpit. Others are going more traditional. Perhaps nowhere are we seeing more contradictory and swirling microtrends than in religious movements today. But it suggests that what we are seeing now is likely to grow— more and more people will be loosely affiliated with religion, and, at the same time, the intense followers will grow in devotion and influence. We have to be vigilant in watching for the growth of offbeat cults, and also hold the line on protecting the separation between church and state.

  And in politics, we are increasingly seeing how both the Democratic and the Republican parties are made up of fragile coalitions whose members are becoming more rigid and intense in their outlook. On the Republican side, the Christian right, the tax-cutting business leaders, the anti-government independents, and the patriotic tough guys are showing their tension as the loose coalition that was their party is fraying at the seams. And on the Democratic side, the historical coalition of union members, minorities, women, and moderates is having to integrate whole new priorities and techniques of the Net Roots and liberal blogoshere.

  And so there is talk about third-, fourth-, and fifth-party candidates coming in. The current pattern suggests it is only a matter of time before one party or the other breaks apart, and that would be a sea change in American politics. As of the spring of 2007, the Democratic Party is energized and showing greater unity. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is losing membership and arguably its identity, and is probably more ripe for breakup.

  In critical area after critical area, we are seeing the potential for greater fragmentation, and the impact of microtrends in accelerating that fragmentation. We are watching groups express their individuality in new ways, putting more stress on religion, politics, popular culture, and family structure.

  The flip side of this disaggregation of society is that it will continue to increase support for tolerance. If individual choices become more and more important to people, then minority rights become equally important to the expression of those differences. I think we are seeing a new tolerance already for different lifestyles, including an accelerated acceptance of the gay lifestyle. While gay marriage as a policy failed in many states, the bar for acceptable treatment of gays, blacks, Hispanics, and women has been moving dramatically—and a single insulting comment like the one made by former Senator George Allen of Virginia, former Seinfeld-ian Michael Richards, or former shockjock Don Imus can end a career.

  If Internet marriage becomes the norm, then by definition the old castes of marriage by religion, neighborhood, ethnicity, and country club will go out the window. This breaking down of barriers, and expanded freedom of choice, are now moving to the heart of all of people’s major life decisions.

  But the central thesis of this book is that society is changing in ways that few are really appreciating or understanding. By focusing only on the major trends that reach a “tipping point,” most observers are missing the fact that you no longer have to reach that point to be a successful trend with a vast potential impact on society.

  Over 600,000 felons coming out of jail per year is a tripling of the rate of returning ex-felons, compared to just twenty years ago. Unless we do something completely different to work with these newly released felons, crime will go up, and our society will change as a result.

  Immigrants who used to hide in the shadows are flexing their political muscle by deeply touching the millions of legal immigrants who vote and are located in key swing states. Unless their immigration and other key domestic priorities are addressed, they will play a significant— and perhaps decisive— role in politics, perhaps literally determining who our next president is.

  If several million more Americans go into the nonprofit sector, declaring that their lives are not about how much money they can make but how much good they can do, that will play an important role in changing the paradigm of success in this country.

  And many of the international trends I have highlighted show that no society will be immune from the sweep of the new choices people are making. Entrepreneurs in Vietnam and artists in China are changing the character and image of these countries. Whether it is through renewed economic or artistic expression, swirling microtrends in those countries have a profound impact on everyone in those societies, as more and more people seek greater expression either in those forms or in other innovative ways.

  Some have argued that the explosion of choice in both products and identities is confusing, paralyzing—even depressing. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink and Barry Schwartz described in The Paradox of Choice, having twenty-four options of jam will draw shoppers in, but having six options of jam will actually trigger more sales. Having too many choices gives rise to feelings of pressure, overload, and regret. We’d rather not have any jam than look back and fear that we chose the wrong one. We’d rather not build ourselves into independent beings than experience the disappointment of being (inevitably) imperfect.

  Maybe. But frankly, that train has left the station. Starbucks isn’t going to stop offering us forty-two brands of coffee, five brands of milk, sixteen flavor enhancers, and nine types of sweetener—and the world isn’t going to force people back into preset gender, spiritual, or professional roles. So while it is smart to learn to manage choices if they get overwhelming, the bottom line is that, in today’s world, the potential for personal satisfaction due to individual choice and freedom is at its highest level ever.

  Other observers of the rise in choice and specialization have argued that the boom threatens societal cohesion. If everything is up for self-determination—from gender to religion to expectations about marriage—then there can be no unity, no community, no single America, no universal peoplehood.

  Well, there probably never was as much national unity as mythologizers like to remember. This is a nation that has always spoken hundreds of languages. This is a nation that fought a civil war over the enslavement of one-third of its people. Indeed, the most famous and celebrated of The Federalist Papers, the intellectual cornerstone of America’s very founding, is James Madison’s treatise on “factions,” describing the inevitability (and productivity) of America’s intensely competitive special interest groups.

  No, what is different now is not that the factions of society are so much more numerous, but rather that they are dividing along lines of personal choice rather than circumstance, like race—or fortune, like landowning. We are at least as intensely divided as any healthy democracy has ever been, but along new fault lines, related to choice. And yet, if anything, as a result, we now have more community. Now 1 million families who want to home-school their children can find like-minded allies and share resources on the Internet—rather than feeling isolated, unprepared, or thwarted in their preference. Now 2 million people who realize in later life that they are gay can live openly with that fact—both they and their families finding support from online communities around the nation and the world.

  So while some may consider it pessimistic to say that twenty-first-century societies are equally or increasingly splintered, I think that on balance it’s good news.

  Sure, in a land of fast-moving and adamantly expressed personal choices, it will be harder for democracies, both emerging ones and old ones like the U.S., to manage all the crisscrossing intensities about both private values and public resources. There will be no simple national solutions, and politicians who try to tell you there can be are fooling you and/or themselves. The world is indeed getting more complex and more differentiated, in terms of the ways people devote their discretionary resources— like money, time, energy, votes, and love.

  But the explosion of individual expression will also make it much harder for autocracies, old and new, to flourish. China is giving way to capital markets and artists because, once exposed to the rest of the world’s information, its billion people won’t stand for anything less. India is giving way to the power of women because, once exposed to the power of their contributions, it won’t want to go back. Perhaps extreme fundamentalist Islam will be a paradox, depending on how it develops during the next few years. In some ways, it is a victim of its many splinter groups seeking to lay claim to the religion with self-proclaimed leaders and their fatwas. In other ways, it seems to be trying to reestablish ritual and the subjugation of personal choice as the superior way to live. It is the motherload of counterintuitive trends, and its flourishing is at odds with perhaps all the other trends of modernity. Fundamentalists know this, which is why they have pitted themselves against those trends, even depicted them as evil. The world has repeatedly gone through periods of darkness after some of its greatest advances, from the fall of Rome to the early Dark Ages, because it failed to prepare adequately for the countertrend that grew from a small seed. The weakness of a world driven by personal choice is that mass collective action becomes more difficult to organize and sustain because intense groups who oppose action can become more powerful. On the one hand, this effect should make all wars less likely; on the other hand, it also makes it harder to sustain broad collective action against determined foes.