Microtrends Squared Quotes

“We cannot continue to operate with a secret system of data collection that is gradually bringing privacy down to zero.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“So if you don’t like Trump, you will feast on more and more anti-Trump articles as the algorithm tries to maximize your engagement. People get pigeonholed and can get more and more spun up in a never-ending loop, just as we outlined”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“You are driving 40 miles an hour and a crane falls on the road in front of you. Your “driver” calculates your choices: hit the crane, killing you and destroying the car; swerve right and save you and the car but killing a pedestrian; swerve left and hit a guardrail that will probably still kill you; save the car but do $200,000 of damage to the guardrails. There is no person in charge to make the call, only a computer that has calculated these probabilities and outcomes and now must make a choice—and on what basis? Save you, save the car, save the public expense?”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“If there is a marginal voter shift from being a middle-class suburban family to angry working-class voters on the right, or to socialists on the left, our elections will increasingly tear us apart rather than bring us together.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“The implications of the new strategy—whereby campaigns target identity and fringe groups to win—are huge.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“As I have written, don’t expect that $100,000 in ads from Russian accounts tipped the election. That’s a pittance compared to $2.4 billion spent by the 2016 presidential campaigns, most of which would have gone into a limited number of swing states.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“they know with absolute certainty that somehow Trump was laundering money with the Russians in exchange for help in the election. They have no evidence for these claims and yet they “know” it just as strongly as elites once believed with absolute certainty that the earth was flat. So did the Russians need money? How, when $2.4 billion was spent on the election campaign, would $100,000 worth of Facebook ads make a difference?”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“careers to start up their social media business. One left a major law firm after graduating from a top law school. They think this is going to make them rich—and they’ve based it all on their dog. They had 250,000 followers and got pickup for their videos, which showed the dog doing amazing tricks, like picking the lock on his cage. But the path to financial success is hardly clear, even for the most committed.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“Off-line summer camps and detoxes specifically designed to detach Americans from their smartphones have popped up as real businesses that are attracting waves of”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“Gaming addiction—particularly on phones—is at DEFCON 3 levels in China. Chinese children play so many video games and exhibit patterns of dependency to the extent that Chinese parents are sending their children to detox camps specifically designed to help kids detach from”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“While we have seen the rise of wellness freaks and the growth of an entire wellness industry, America is, in fact, consuming fewer fruits and vegetables, not more.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“ADHD medications is skyrocketing—in 2003, 7.8 percent of kids had the diagnosis, and as of CDC’s 2014 numbers, that is now 11 percent for youth ages four to seventeen. The market for these drugs is also surging—a report from IBISWorld puts the ADHD drug market at $17.5 billion by 2020.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“Eggs, which had been completely abandoned, got a second look. Maybe they had been unfairly singled out when they are a cheap and easy source of protein. They don’t have the fat marbled issues of red meat, and their cholesterol has been declared less harmful than previously thought.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“Births to unmarried mothers have risen sharply over the past generation, from about 21 percent of all births in the early 1980s to 43 percent during the 2009–2013 period.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“If the trend keeps up, you can imagine the never marrieds demanding three-month paid sabbaticals every five years and maybe a bonus for the reduced health care expenses of one person instead of coverage afforded to families”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“lot of these women who are excelling will simply pass up on marriage and children altogether, joining the ranks of the never married, and that would be a great loss for men and women today, as well as for future generations.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“a lot of these women who are excelling will simply pass up on marriage and children altogether, joining the ranks of the never married, and that would be a great loss for men and women today, as well as for future generations.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“job was to have and care for their children, as women have become a bigger part of the labor force, with more education and earning more money, they are unlikely to want to have larger numbers of children.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions

“Instead, the Information Age has given way to the Disinformation Age, in which fake information abounds.”
― Mark Penn, Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions