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By Root 822 0

who were so far removed from hardships that they began to care more about politicians’ so-called character than about the actual issues. As reported by the New York Observer, one attendee responded with a skepticism that was shared by many in the audience: “Obama strikes me as a macrotrend,” the man drily remarked. And indeed Obama, having just won contests in Louisiana, Maine, and Washington State, would the next day prevail in Maryland and Virginia, and a week after that in Hawaii and Wisconsin, amassing during those ten days an insurmountable advantage in delegates. Apparently, all of Penn’s polling and targeting and microtrends could offer his candidate no useful insight into how to counter the broad movement at the back of her opponent, the charismatic young senator from Illinois.

I should hasten to add that this outcome did not prove Penn wrong, per se—about Obama in particular or about the “size” of trends in general. Penn’s claims are essentially unprovable either way, because the very word “trend” has confusion stabbed straight through the heart of it. What Mark Penn has at his disposal, undeniably, is data, culled from various forays into public opinion by his own polling firm and others. What his book did was tell stories using that data: this survey shows one group to have increased in number, another survey shows that more Americans prefer this to that, etc. But do these stories really mean anything? Consider how they were selected: Penn and his researchers culled through polling data looking for anomalies, on the premise that unexpected results would make the most relevant microtrends. The “aspiring snipers,” for example, rated among the seventy-five because one telephone poll of six hundred young Californians happened to find six who mentioned “sniper” (military, mind you) as a future goal; an intriguing result, to be sure. But a different sample on a different day would almost certainly have produced a different “microtrend”—or, more likely, none at all, because another survey in another place would have meanwhile been producing a more anomalous result. There is so much polling data being created, by Penn’s firm and others, that he could assuredly rewrite his book every six months, with an entirely new crop of trends each time. The more we collect data, the more stories—micro and macro—we can tell about it, and the less we can expect those stories to remain valid in six months, let alone a year or a decade.

In his indispensable book Fooled by Randomness, the former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb illustrates this problem with the hypothetical case of a fortunate dentist, a man whose stock portfolio is fated to return, on average, 15 percent annually above the interest rate. The catch is that it will do so with the typical short-term volatility, i.e., his stocks will go up and down, as stocks do, even as their general march is upward. Taleb observes that if this dentist is an overly attentive man, refreshing his ticker every minute, he will open himself to great anxiety, experiencing only 241 pleasurable moments each day to 239 unpleasurable ones. Even if he checks just once a day, he will be hardly more content, experiencing perhaps sixteen good days to fourteen bad—and perhaps he will be inclined, like our business reporters do, to attribute each day’s bad fortune to all manner of macro- or microtrends.6 But Taleb goes on:

Consider the situation where the dentist examines his portfolio only upon receiving the monthly account from the brokerage house. As 67% of his months will be positive, he incurs only four pangs of pain per annum and eight uplifting experiences. . . . Now consider the dentist looking at his performance only every year. Over the next 20 years that he is expected to live, he will experience 19 pleasant surprises for every unpleasant one!

Taleb’s point is simple: too much data leads us to see trends where none exist, to mistake randomness for order. What appear to us as microtrends, or even macrotrends, are more often than not just nanostories: narratives that the facts cannot