Want to know what future holds? Cast away Fukuyama, flash down the tube futurists' musings: this is the way to spot future trends and opportunities in their infancy. Though some are trivial and marginal, others are real eye-openers and counterintuitive.

You'd think a book about all the many little trends in the country would be interesting, and this book is interesting... at least for the first few pages. Then it gets repetitive and you wonder why anybody would care about these so-called "trends." So what if there's a small group of people who have long attention spans and another with short attention spans and another with really long commutes and another with really short commutes. I got bored fairly quickly with this book. ( )

Sounded neat, but it's just a bunch of intermittently interesting statistics tied together by the guy's out-of-touch observations.

For example, in a chapter on adults who play videogames:
"The games all focus on taking over worlds, dating, or killing. But what most 33-year-old men want is to make a killing in the stock market, or if they want to knock someone off, it's their boss and his corner office. Their female counterparts have just had their first or second baby, and are dealing with child development or sibling rivalry."

Really? What, is this 1953? Fuck off, dude. ( )

Some mildly interesting data about overlooked segments of society, but distorted with bizarre personal remarks and hamfisted explanations. Best skimmed. ( )

A good effort by Clinton's Karl Rove: A book categorizing approximately 75 trends the author sees in the modern world (American-focused).
Written so that the ideas presented can be processed in everything from bite-sized individual morsels to sectional chunks (e.g. Love, Sex, and Relationships).

Cons:
-Sometimes staid writing
-Use of book to plug commercial contacts
(Microsoft's Zune, Mark, as leading some kind of social music revolution? the Zune? C'mon!)
-tendency to generalize anecdotes or a handful of data points he has seen into opinions he thinks are held by significant amounts of people
-highly timely, and will not age well

Microtrends is intriguing; for any watcher of society, Penn's book will likely tell you about social changes you already knew, will likely crystallize broader happenings you have-been-seeing-but-have-not-yet-realized or put a name to, and will likely introduce you to entirely new trends (and it is in these startling moments that the book becomes particularly worth the read).

Mark should be applauded for showing the value of numbers, and of data, in modern society. My only qualm with his idea-sourcing is how he never looks to the numbers to disprove a trend. Instead, he looks at them to justify what he already suspects. This is one of humanity's cognitive biases: the need to confirm what we think is true (rather than taking the alternate, harder, and ultimately more rewarding route of trying to disprove whether something is true, as real science does). While Penn is often right in his trends, that does not mean he will always be right, or that his methodology, as it stands, is not flawed.

Still, Penn effectively yanks the reader's attention in such a way that we can't help but notice new things about our daily world. Armed, often, with convincing data and the power of demographics, he makes predictions that seem sensible (and though perhaps originally startling, also seem quickly convincing in their effect).

Microtrends grabbed me, personally, in the way that I like: rather than telling me stuff, it made me think about things on my own, it made me puzzle and question and conjecture and ultimately conclude things about this crazy world of ours.

I liked Microtrends; I think you will too.