So the democracies of the future may find it harder to maintain stable coalitions, and will find that issue and lifestyle coalitions (i.e., antiwar activists, or single Moms) will most likely replace the identity politics of the past. More and more actions will be based on 51-percent coalitions rather than a broadly unified public, because personal choice tends to pull people in opposite directions and makes it harder to bring them together. But this also means that it will get harder to unify people on behalf of new dictatorial regimes. The more either kind of regime ignores the power of the microtrend, the more it will find itself in trouble with its citizens.

  Microtargeting will become the dominant means of advertising and marketing communication, replacing the old one-way TV and radio communications. That is why Internet advertising firms are now selling at such a huge premium—advertising and marketing will increasingly be on a personalized basis. Every communication that can be personalized will be, and this will lead to a huge expansion of the personal communications industry whose job it will be to advertise the right products to the right niches of people. The big online companies are fast becoming the repositories of personal information that can be used to build the marketing campaigns of the future.

  Personal choice is also reaching its highest level in social life, as more choices mean more dating and a vastly expanded pool of potential spouses. Never in history has an individual been able to reach so easily out of his or her social circle to find potential mates. The combination of romance at work and online has the chance of shattering any caste system, and creating a new form of marital mobility.

  And the broad patterns of choice are clear: more work; more individual fulfillment; new family units; greater social, economic, and physical mobility; wider circles of friends and acquaintances; and greater involvements in society.

  The next generation of workers will be better educated and more technologically comfortable, yet they will be more difficult to satisfy unless they are treated in new ways to match their expectations of unlimited choice. Employees will essentially have to be microtargeted from day one—and given matching mentors, motivating messages, and customized loyalty programs.

  It is also clear that in many areas, contradictory trends will continue to create good markets at both ends of the spectrum. Healthful food will continue to exist side by side with good-tasting but unhealthful choices. More emphasis on children as the center of life will exist next to more households focused on self-actualization. The tension between religion and secularism will grow with huge segments adopting one or the other viewpoint. While Moms continue to be the center of family life, the new relationship kids have with Dads, including older Dads and divorced Dads, may finally get recognition in the marketplace.

  As we step back and look at the culture in America and around the world, the societal atoms that I have called microtrends appear to be driving change in almost every area of everyday life. There may not be a lot of Internet-based marriages yet, but they are changing our social structure. The straight-sex ratio may be only slightly uneven, but it is affecting all of us. The satisfied elites in America, removed from any real economic struggle, are driving much of the media perspective of the world. The number of artists in China may pale in comparison to the number of engineers, but they are beginning to pull the world’s biggest country in new directions.

  Behind each of these trends, I think, is a level of rationality driving the change. People are sleeping less because they are doing more. Empty-nesters are treating pets as children because they long for the children who have moved on to their own lives. Parents are becoming more permissive because they believe that words are more effective than the back of the hand. Underlying the idea of microtrends is that there is rarely a single right way to do things—and that similar people may make very different choices and start two totally contradictory trends. And yet both of those decisions can be totally rational. Even those choosing the most irrational path of all—terrorism—appear to be making their decisions based on careful study and deeply held beliefs. Long Attention Spanners represent a movement away from split-second decisions and toward deeper, deliberative thinking.

  Clearly, the seventy-five microtrends in this book are simply representative of the thousands of new trends out there, and there are new trends occurring each day. The great fear of the future has been that mass societies would become faceless societies, with people forced into conformity—everyone looking alike, dressing alike, and being required to think alike. This was seen as almost a necessary sacrifice in order to feed and clothe growing populations with diminishing resources. But I suggest we are headed in completely the opposite direction—a future in which choice, driven by individual tastes, becomes the dominant factor, and in which these choices are reinforced by the ability to connect and communicate with communities of even the smallest niches.

  The future rarely turns out as predicted. The reason is that most predictions are driven by the same conventional wisdom that drives the daily consensus around us, and are usually based on the big, easily spotted observations like the spread of the global economy. But as you dig deeper, you see a world teeming with lesser-known, harder-to-spot developments that really are the small forces that will drive tomorrow’s big changes.

  Acknowledgments

  I had the idea for this book for a number of years and was always going to get around to it “next year.” But at the urging of Bob Barnett, this became the year to finally put it all down.

  I wish to thank above all Kinney Zalesne, my collaborator, whose brilliant work helped turn the ideas into a reality. I know Kinney from working with her in the 1996 presidential campaign, and she learned polling then and is a great writer as well. I have thoroughly enjoyed our collaboration.

  I also want to thank Bob Barnett, who represented the book and whose proddings got it off the ground and whose belief in it led successfully to its publication. He is truly remarkable.

  Friends and colleagues who suggested, reviewed, sharpened, and, in some cases, exemplified microtrends include Scott Siff, Don Baer, Sergio Bendixen, Mich Mathews, Jonathan Kessler, Billy Mann, Neera Tanden, David Ginsberg, and J. B. Schramm. And I wish to thank Bill Gates and Bill Clinton for their support.

  I am also very grateful to my editor and publisher, Jonathan Karp, who believed in this project from the first moment and guided it throughout with great skill and enthusiasm. His team, including Nate Gray, Cary Goldstein, Fred Chase, Bob Castillo, and Anne Twomey, are first-rate partners.

  I also wish to thank Melissa Wisner, the book’s senior research analyst. For a solid year, Melissa threw herself into this project with tremendous energy and devotion, and was the front line in gathering all the numbers that got turned into stories. She did a fabulous job.

  Lora Seo, an intern, devoted many months to ferreting out some of the most arcane data in the book. There is no decades-old Census table or obscure corporate data point that Lora cannot wrestle to the ground.

  Many people at Penn, Schoen & Berland also gave of their own time and creativity to support the book. In particular, Josh Werman, Nick Danoff, Andrew Claster, Matt Lieppe, and Emily Colligan provided top-quality work over and over. Others who enriched the effort with contributions large and small include Alex Braun, Amy Cohen, Brad Dawgert, Jonathan Gardner, Amanda Keeter, Beth Lester, Amy Leveton, Jonathan Penn, Jay Ragsdale, Merrill Raman, Ian Ritchie, LaDon Roeder, Peter Roehrig, Rachel Schwartz, Payal Shah, Craig Smith, Jessica Trainor, and Grant Zallis.

  Finally, I wish to thank all of the trend-spotters out there who are finding new trends every day. Many of you are recognized in the Sources, which I tried to document thoroughly. Some of the trends in the book are brand new; some had been spotted and I developed new implications in the context of Microtrends; and some are an amalgam of previous work and new work. I hope this book will both acknowledge your skill and the great value of statistical trend-spotting.

  Sources

  I. Love, Sex, and Relationships

  Sex-Ratio Singles

  The Social Organization of Sexuality study was first reported in Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 1994). The third study cited is Samuel S. Janus and Cynthia L. Janus, The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior (Wiley, 1994). All three studies are referenced in Paul Varnell, “More Gays than Lesbians,” on the Web site the Independent Gay Forum, November 30, 1999, accessed June 2006, at http://www.indegayforum.org/news/show/26996.html.

  The data in the graph on the number of unmarried women in America come from U.S. Census, “Marital Status of the Population 15 Years Old and Over, by Sex and Race: 1950 to Present,” accessed June 2006, at http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/msl.csv.

  For more on the sex ratio in America, see T. J. Mathews, and B. F. Hamilton, “Trend Analysis of the Sex Ratio at Birth in the United States,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 53, No. 20, Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 2005, accessed at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr5320.pdf.

  The percentage of gay people in America is difficult to measure; see discussion at “Demographics,” http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/demographics.html. But many studies hover at about 5 percent overall, and polls from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) conducted in recent years regularly yield that percentage.

  Data on the gender ratio in the black community come from U.S. Census, “Population by Sex and Age, for Black Alone and White Alone, Not Hispanic: March 2004,” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 2004, Racial Statistics Branch, Population Division, accessed at http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/black/ppl-186/tabla.pdf and http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/black/ppl-186/tablb.pdf.

  Data on the incarceration rates of black males and females come from Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, May 2006, NCJ 213133, accessed at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim05.pdf.

  For information on average life expectancy, see E. Arias, “United States Life Tables, 2003,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 54, No. 14, Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 2006, accessed at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54 14.pdf.

  The National Association of Realtors data on single women purchasing homes was cited in David Calvert, “Dream House, Sans Spouse: More Women Buy Homes,” USA Today, February 14, 2006.

  The data on the rise in Single Mothers by Choice come from Amy Harmon, “More Single Women Become Mothers by Choice,” New York Times, December 29, 2005.

  For information on degrees conferred by sex, see “Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctor’s Degrees Conferred by Degree-Granting Institutions, by Sex of Student and Field of Study: 2002–03,” National Center for Education Statistics, accessed at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/lt3.asp.

  Cougars

  The data on dating habits of women aged 40–69 come from a study conducted by Knowledge Networks, Inc., for the AARP magazine: Xenia P. Montenegro, Ph.D., “Lifestyles, Dating and Romance: A Study of Midlife Singles,” AARP The Magazine, September 2003, accessed August 2006 at http://www.aarp.org/research/family/lifestyles/aresearch-import-522.html.

  The census-based comparisons come from L. A. Johnson, “Love for All,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 9, 2005. This article also summarized the changes in dating preferences on Match.com.

  Valerie Gibson was quoted on the ABC News Web site, “Are More Older Women with Younger Men?” May 5, 2005, , accessed August 2006.

  The data on live births to women aged 40–44 and 45–49 come from the National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the United States, 1994, Vol. 1, “Natality, Table 1–13,” Live Births by Age, Race and Hispanic Origin of Mother: United States and Each State, 1994, accessed March 2007; and the National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1, Table 2, “Live Births by Age of Mother, Live-Birth Order, and Race of Mother: United States, 2004,” September 29, 2006, accessed March 2007.

  Office Romancers

  The Vault Survey, cited throughout, is their “Office Romance Survey,” conducted January 2006, with 693 responses from employees representing a variety of industries across the U.S., accessed April 2007, at http://www.vault.com/nr/newsmain.jsp?nrpage=3&chid=420&articleid=26126479.

  The Hotjobs survey was accessed April 2007, at http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/jobseeker/about/pressreleases/021103.html.

  The data on approval of co-worker relationships come from a 2005 CareerBuilder.com survey, “Office Romance,” conducted in January 2005 of more than 1,300 workers, accessed April 2007, at http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?id=pr160&sd=2/7/2005&ed=12/31/2005&cbRecursionCnt=l&cbsid=lda66156dedf4c9e83ee497e5c8abb8d-230303910-J5-5.

  Data on singles in the workforce come from Marshall Loeb, “5 Tips to Consider When You Fall in Love on the Job,” www.careerjournal.com, September 22, 2005; and Ellen R. McGrattan and Richard Rogerson, “Changes in Hours Worked, 1950–2000,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Quarterly Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, July 2004.

  Data on male versus female behavior come from “Interoffice Romance Survey,” a joint survey sponsored by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell’s Lawyers.com and Glamour magazine, August 12, 2004.

  The SHRM study is Michael Parks, “2006 Workplace Romance: Poll Findings,” a study by the Society for Human Resource Management and Careerjournal.com, January 2006.

  Data on female Ph.D.’s come from U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), “Degrees and Other Formal Awards Conferred” surveys, 1976–77 through 1984–85, and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), “Completions” surveys, 1986–87 through 1998–99, and Fall 2000 through Fall 2002 surveys, table, prepared August 2003, accessible at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d03/tables/pdf/table270.pdf.

  Commuter Couples

  The Times story on the Clintons was Patrick Healy, “For Clintons, Delicate Dance of Married and Public Lives,” New York Times, May 23, 2006.

  Data on married couples in 2005 living apart from their spouses for reasons other than separation come from U.S. Census, accessed June 2006, at http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2005/tabA1-all.csv. The 1990 data come from http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable? bm=y&-ds name=DEC 1990 STF3 & CONTEXT=dt&-mt name=DEC 1990 STF3 P027&-mt name=DEC 1990 STF3 P038&-redoLog=false&- caller=geoselect&geo id=01000US&-geo id=NBSP&-format=&-lang=en&-SubjectID=11745086.

  The AARP data come from a January 11, 2005, KCET.org radio transcript, accessed June 2006, at http://www.kcet.org/lifeandtimes/archives/200501/20050111.php, quoting Nancy Griffin of AARP The Magazine.

  For more from the Center for the Study of Long-Distance Relationships, and Dr. Gregory Guldner, see http://www.longdistancerelationships.net/.

  In the International Picture, the Global Relocation Survey can be found at http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/03/27/rspouse ed3 1.php#. The Kuwait data come from “Foreign Workers in the Middle East,” Migration News, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1996. Data on Egypt and Saudi Arabia come from http://www.migrationdrc.org/research/regions/egyptthemiddleeast.html, and the Saudi earnings data come from http://www.enews.ma/foreign-workers_i398340.html. Data on Dubai come from Eric Weiner, “Thanks for Your Hard Work. Now Get Out!,” Slate, August 15, 2005, accessed January 2007, at http://www.slate.com/id/2124497/fr/rss/.

  Internet Marrieds

  The Pew study relied on this chapter is Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, “Online Dating,” Pew Internet and American Life Project, March 5, 2006.

  The online dating magazine Web site was accessed March 2007, at www.onlinedatingmagazine.com.

  Marriage data come from National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 54, No. 8, “Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths, Provisional Data for June 2006.”

  The PSB poll of Internet Marrieds was conducted online on March 27–28, 2007.

  II. Work Life

  Working Retired

  The data on seniors in the workforce come from “Labor Force Participation of Persons Ages 62 and Over, 1982–2005,” Current Population Survey (CPS), Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  The data on vacation days worldwide come from the World Tourism Organization, whose Web site is http://www.world-tourism.org/. For more on unused vacation and working while on vacation, see Stephanie Armour, “U.S. Workers Feel Burn of Long Hours, Less Leisure,” USA Today, December 18, 2003; and “Annual Expedia.com Survey Reveals 51.2 Million American Workers Are Vacation Deprived,” April 25, 2007, accessed May 2007, at http://press.expedia.com/index.php?s=pressreleases&item=372.

  The Merrill Lynch survey report is “The Merrill Lynch New Retirement Survey: A Perspective from the Baby Boomer Generation,” February 23, 2005. The survey itself interviewed 3,448 U.S. baby boomers by phone and online in February 2004.

  For more on occupations preferred by older workers, see “Old. Smart. Productive: Surprise! The Graying of the Workforce Is Better News than You Think,” BusinessWeek, June 27, 2005.

  The traffic accident data come from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Table 63, “Driver Involvement Rates per 100,000 Licensed Drivers, by Age, Sex, and Crash Severity,” accessed February 2007, at http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFAnn/2004HTML/TSF2004.htm#chap2.

  C. Eugene Steuerle, “Working to Fix Our Fiscal Woes,” Washington Post, April 14, 2006. Thanks also to Dr. Steuerle for personally walking us through some of this analysis by telephone.

  Extreme Commuters

  Some key Extreme Commuter articles, from which some of the cited data are drawn, include Keith Naughton, “The Long and Grinding Road,” Newsweek, May 1, 2006; “Extreme Commuting,” BusinessWeek Online, February 21, 2005; and Debbie Howlett and Paul Overberg, “Think Your Commute Is Tough?,” USA Today, November 29, 2004.