Trendspotting as junk science
In 2001, being weary with life in the corporate world after a stint at at a brand strategy consultancy, I wanted to escape into academia. I remembered that writing my Master's thesis at University had been a blast - little wonder, I wrote it about organizational change at Disneyland in California - so I felt that I was somehow cut out for a career in the ivory tower. My application nearly went through but my GMAT Math scores were abysmal and stopped my academic career before it had even started. I wasn't surpised having never been interested in or particularly good at anything having to do with numbers. I fake it pretty well these days but have no deeper understanding of statistics, figures, numbercrunching or general mathematics. Science is about measurability and measurements are usually done best with numbers and statistical tools.
However, these days many things are passed off as science. The books of Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Levitt, and many others are described as "popular science" and virtually no talkshow is complete without the often pseudo-scientific patina of an "expert".
Edward E. Leamer of UCLA has something very interesting to say about the subject of passing opinions off as science. In a paper from August, 2007, called "Housing and the Business Cycle", he states the following:
treated group. When all we have are non-experimental data, correlation is in the data but
causation is in the mind of the observer.
With only temporal orderings and no experimental evidence, we do what empirics do: we
rely on stories. To each temporal ordering we attach a predictive narrative or a causal
narrative or both. We draw firm causal conclusions from the temporal orderings when
the causal narrative is compelling and when there is no equally compelling predictive
narrative. This is literature and wisdom, not science...It’s faith-based decision making, which is much influenced by the rhetorical skills of the advocates"
This is interesting for a trendspotter since trendspotting often borrows terminology and tools from scientific study in order to draw often expensive conclusions for our clients. Much of these conclusions, however, are complete hogwash. Inspiring, exciting, titilating but still non-sense from a factual standpoint. I've heard so-called "trendspotters" claim that "the young today are less into sex.drugs and rock n'roll than earlier generations". I've been to trend seminars that rally around "the future role of China" spewing out large numbers intended to scare off any China-doubters. Virtually everyday magazines and newspapers use "trends" as a substitute for academic rigor.
