So, I'm wrapping up "Microtrends: The small forces behind tomorrow's big changes". It's authored by Mark Penn, who was the pollster and Clinton advisor that coined the phrase "soccer moms". While I always found that phrase to be rather annoying and cheesy, he has street cred as a guy who can spot trends, articulate them well and get people of influence and power to act on his recommendations.
The book opens with a rather unique analysis of sex ratios in America and the trends that indicate that young males are actually a hot commodity in the love scene, way more so than women. Here's how this hypothesis evolves (specific to America):
- At birth, it's advantage girl. There are 90,000 more boys born each year than girls, which is a nice start for a straight girl. The book doesn't delve into this, but I've read in other studies that women are much more likely to miscarry girls than boys because the female body sometimes views girls as an infectious agent, as opposed to boys and the body is therefore more likely to reject, simply put.
- By their 18th birthday, the ratio is completely flipped to a 51:49 - majority women. This is due to the "testosterone factor" which is responsible for the disproportionate death rate of young males: car accidents, gun shots, risky behavior in general.
- It gets worse for women at this point. Gay men outnumber lesbians by approximately 2 to 1. With the estimate of 5% of U.S. adults having a gay preference, there are then 7.5 million gay men and 3.5 million lesbians. If you now normalize for the total straight population, you get a ratio of 53:47 - majority women, which is quite significant.
- It then worsens for black women since the death ratio for young black males is even higher, which ultimately moves the ratio to 75:43 - majority black women to black men.
Can you say "Advantage Straight Male"?
What does this all mean? Well, aside from men perhaps now realizing an additional advantage in life after millennia of formulating a "man's world", there are broad implications for everything from home ownership growth amongst women to workforce changes that must be recognized. The value in the book is that it points out emerging trends that are not yet fully realized and highlights what the future implications are. This type of thinking has benefits ranging from strategically targeting a specific career path to recognizing investment opportunities that will evolve years from now given the evolution of these various "Microtrends".
While I provided a flavor for the book in the aforementioned example, some other topics of interest included:
- Office Romancers
- Extreme Commuters (especially relevant at $125 oil)
- Lefties
- Aspiring Snipers
- Caffeine Crazies
- Surgery Lovers
- Smart Child Left Behind
I bought the book because I was fascinated with Freakonomics and figured the book might have some similarities. As it turns out, the topics were rather demographics and behaviorally focused as opposed to the economics focus of Freakonomics, but I have to admit I enjoyed portions of the book, despite his obvious liberal tilt and the author's narcissism. Not that this blog is meant to convey political opinions, but when an author goes out of his way to take pot shots at anything Republican or conservative, even if on an irrelevant tangent, it becomes a bit annoying.
Overall, I give the book an 8/10. It makes for great highbrow coffee table talk and you might actually learn something while you're at it...if you can put up with the praise lavished upon Billary throughout.
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