We’ve written pages on the “College Admissions Wave” in this blog and elsewhere (see “The College Tuition Debt Bubble” and “College Admissions“).  Today, we came across some new demographic data from the Pew Research Center.

It is no shock to anyone with college-aged children that college campuses are a lot more crowded these days.   Much of the focus in the media has been that a higher percentage of American youths were attending college.   We conceded that this was true, but we insisted that the primary diver of the increased demand was not the higher percentage of kids going to school but the shear number of kids in the Echo Boom.   (It’s not a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak, but a much bigger pie itself.)  We now have some numbers to test this. Read the rest of this entry »

Prohibition was repealed long ago, of course.   President Franklin Delano Roosevelt found it convenient to reintroduce booze into American popular culture for two reasons.  First, it won him votes.  Secondly, it brought in a windfall of tax revenues at a time when they were sorely needed.

With all levels of government — federal, state, and local — facing varying levels of fiscal crisis, and with faith in our elected representatives at a level so low as to border on outright contempt, might this move from FDR’s playbook be worth a look? Read the rest of this entry »

The National Center for Health Statistics released birth data for 2008, and to the surprise of some, births acutally fell compared to 2007 — by 68,000.   The New York Times writes, “In 2007, the number of births in the United States broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom.  But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week.”

Interestingly, the birth rate shrank the most in the states hardest hit by the recession — California, Florida, and Arizona — giving credence to the belief that the decline was due to the bad economy.  After all, what would-be parent would want to have a baby knowing that they might lose their job…or home!

We agree with this analysis, though we would add one important caveat: don’t forget demographics! Read the rest of this entry »

I rarely take the time to read the “Business Life” section of the Financial Times.  It’s the one section that I consider “soft” fluff journalism in a newspaper that usually prints high-quality “hard” news.   (I see little value in reading about water cooler etiquette, new standards of office political correctness, and the “next new thing” MBA buzzwords that sound remarkably similar to the previous batch of “next new thing” MBA buzzwords…I got more than enough of this drivel in grad school, thank you very much.)

At any rate, in scanning the section, I did come across an interesting and worthwhile article on the interaction in the workplace between the Baby Boomers and their children, the Echo Boomers (or Gen Y).   In “A to Z of Generation Y Attitudes,” Alison Maitland analyzes reports by the US Center for Work-Life Policy and London Business School titled “Bookend Generations” and “The Reflexive Generation,” respectively, and finds that the Echo Boomers, despite all of their supposed tech sophistication, are not too unlike the Baby Boomers.  Both generations tend to be rather unorthodox and free thinking relative to Generation X, the much smaller generation sandwiched between them.   The attitudes of Generation X tend to be more conventional, as their smaller numbers naturally make them more conformist.

In this sense, the coming years will be defined by “bookend” dynamics in which the both the older Boomers and the younger Echo Boomers will set the social and career standards with Gen X being lost in the middle.

Charles Sizemore, CFA

Co-author of the recently-published Boom or Bust: Understanding and Profiting from a Changing Consumer Economy