Think Small to Change Big

Mark Penn's claim to fame is his work on Bill Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign, where he came up with the now-tired cliche "Soccer Moms", these middle-class, suburban mothers concerned about the impact of policymaking and reforms on the well-being of their households. Microtrends follows a similar path, to find the Next Small Thing that could shape the immediate future. For every mass movement in American society and culture, there is a counteractive movement: the microtrend. They may cover as little as 1% of the population but exert a series of powerful torsion forces on the popular momentum This book is a collection of 75 microtrends that Penn and his collaborator, Kinney Zalesne, have uncovered based on observations of peripheral patterns and a subsequent analysis of telephone polls and surveys. Some of these microtrends are superficial fluff (for example: knitting as the newest hobby for teens, the craze for plastic and cosmetic surgery across all ages), while others that touch upon demographic or societal diversity are particularly interesting.

Take a look at the "Impressionable Elites". The highly educated and wealthy top strata of society "" PhDs and professionals "" are more likely to vote for the presidential candidate that wins their hearts through his/her personable, affable, warm demeanour than a promising or ambitious policy platform. Penn thinks the elites use such subjective criteria for judgment simply because they are content with their current high standard of living and have no pressing major concerns relating to health, education or taxes. Penn conducted a poll of the electorate across different income levels (though he does not say how big the sample was or how he performed the survey). The voters in the $100,000 and above income bracket were more likely to elect their president based on character qualities, while all other income groups were more concerned with the candidate's stand on issues. Since the elites are most likely to make frequent donations, and may be high-profile, they are a big deal in the voter meat market, even if they comprise less than 5% of America's population and are largely disconnected from the masses. It remains to be seen if the presidential candidates will have to put on their friendly, warm face to woo these Impressionable Elites.

The entire world knows how fattening and unhealthy is the meat-and-carb-heavy, vegetable-lite diet that America's children are reared on. Many public schools have had to ban chicken nuggets, pepperoni pizzas and greasy hamburgers from their cafeterias. On the other hand, it is heartening to know about the rise of the Vegan Children. At least 1.5 million children are vegetarian by choice, and a significant percentage is vegan (eschewing all dairy). Surprisingly, most of them live in meat-eating households, but remain loyal to the green at the dinner table, and enjoy vegetables more than meat substitutes. Penn attributes this spread of vegetarianism to increased awareness of environmental and health issues, as well as the surfeit of children's entertainment with personification of animal characters. Since the lifestyle choices of children and adolescents reflect popular trends of their peers, we may see vegetarianism being the norm a few decades on, and lower incidences of heart disease. This is an example of a small-scale trend that could shake things up tomorrow.

Caveat lector: reader beware. This may be an endlessly fascinating book, but it is no sequel to Freakonomics. Neither Penn nor Zalesne is an academic and it shows, from the poor choice and insufficient explanation of the research methodology, to the sacrifice of depth for breadth. Any college statistics professor will excoriate the use of percentages based on telephone surveys and polls as evidence for a hypothesis, because of sampling errors, data mining, and the biggest false assumption: correlation implies causation. Some of the research is based on secondary sources, such as anecdotal events, magazine and news reports and career websites, which makes the authors' analytical reasoning specious. Penn calls himself a trendspotter, and microtrends are just that, a concept that may be trendy now but will fade into oblivion for lack of cogency and relevance. Read this book, and put it on your fiction bookshelf or magazine rack, where it belongs.

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MICROTRENDS
THE SMALL FORCES BEHIND
TODAY'S BIG CHANGES

Mark J Penn with E Kinney Zalesne
Penguin India
£5.99, 370 pages