1 minute readDemographics, for a moment in the 1970s and ’80s, had an A.I.-like applied business and strategic buzz factor.
“Demographics is destiny” emerged as a system of beliefs, and as a relatively young social science, it had the coming of age and young adulthood of the post-World War II Baby Boom as evidence of its sweeping predictive powers. At each successive life-stage, baby boomers reshaped communities, schools, the workplace, business strategy, economics, and culture.
Demographics’ statistical properties, definitions, and foundational filtering – on households as its building blocks of insight – could model futures that, otherwise, hid over foreseeable reality’s horizon lines, or even around the next corner in time, or the corner after that.
Technology, consumer behavioral data, even geospatial information now offer the kinds of precisely predictive intelligence into a person’s future behaviors, attitudes, and preferences, as to render demographics a blunt tool.
Not, however, when it’s Bill Frey curating the raw materials into take-aways. Demographics for Bill Frey – a Brookings Institution senior fellow and research professor with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and Population Studies Center – remains a predictive instrument, a periscope.
His While a majority of adults ages 30 and older would prefer communities with larger homes over those with more walkability, adults under 30 are somewhat more likely to express the opposite preference. This reflects a modest shift from 2021, when 55% of 18- to 29-year-olds preferred communities with larger homes. That share has dropped 10 percentage points over the last two years.” The good news here is this: there’s much more to learn from the future than the entire wealth of knowledge from the past.
