Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cheryl Russell (Beaufort, SC), a recognized authority on statistics and demographics, is the editorial director of New Strategist Publications and the former editor-in-chief of American Demographics magazine. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TV Guide, Family Circle, and many other publications, and she has appeared on the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and PBS. She is the author of The Master Trend and 100 Predictions for the Baby Boom.

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BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW

Prometheus Books

Introduction

Here's why: by opening these pages, you have shown yourself to be someone who wants to know how the world works. This book tells you how hundreds of things work-not things like computers or microwaves, but marriages and money. Bet You Didn't Know explains the how and why of life in the United States. Each page of this book is another page in the story of your life.

How come I know so much about you? Because I am a demographer and demographers are trained to stick their nose into other people's business. Demography is all about sex and babies, marriage and divorce, moving in and moving out, how long you will live, and how well you will live. This books answers the kinds of questions you probably ask yourself every day: Why do so many unmarried women have babies? Are children worth the trouble? Do we own more dogs than cats? Why do we need so much self-storage space? How often do people feel like they're going crazy? Why is it so hard to make ends meet? Are immigrants willing to learn English? What do blacks really think about whites? How happy are other people's marriages? Is anyone a virgin on their wedding day? Is a college education still worth the cost? Why have we gained so much weight?

If you are a curious person-and if you've read this far, I would say you qualify-you have enough questions to keep the Google search engine busy for a lifetime. But you don't have to bother searching for the answers because you now hold them in your hand. As the former editor of American Demographics magazine and once dubbed the "Trend Cop," I have made a career out of tracking the facts and spotting the trends. Long embedded in the frontline of American life, I am trained to separate the real stories from the distractions. Think of Bet You Didn't Know as the social science equivalent of "two-minute mysteries." On each page I tackle another of life's vexing questions and untangle the answers. I may not always solve the mystery, but in a few paragraphs I might have you thinking differently about the answer.

LOOK OVER HERE!

Let's talk about distractions. Thanks to the demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, there are lots of them. Both television and newspapers face the daunting task of producing fresh headlines 24/7 just to keep you coming back to their advertisers. That's the media's bottom line. To improve the bottom line, reporters are always on the hunt for stories that will keep you coming back for more. What you too often get from the frantic hunt for headlines are glib reports meant to entertain rather than enlighten.

Bet You Didn't Know entertains and enlightens. It will not waste your time by restating the obvious, as so many headlines already do ("Population is Growing!" "Some Richer than Others!" "Women Earn Less than Men!"). Rather than recite old news, Bet You Didn't Know brings you the breaking news. Prepare for some "ah ha" moments.

Bet You Didn't Know is intended to be a fun read, but it is also a challenge to our deeply imbedded and often wildly wacky beliefs about love, marriage, children, jobs, and money. These are tales from the trenches as we try to hold on to the ground gained by our parents and grandparents. That acreage is being eroded by technological change, denial, and a deeply powerful and primitive embrace of belief over evidence, faith over facts, and judgment over action. Bet You Didn't Know connects the dots, revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly about life in the United States today.

YOUR CHEAT SHEET

Bet You Didn't Know examines hundreds of issues-201 to be exact, with one issue per page. Each page highlights a demographic fact, telling the story behind it, revealing the trends driving it, and arriving at an often-surprising conclusion. All this is accomplished in a few paragraphs of about three hundred words. It is not easy to explore topics as big as out-of-wedlock births, our obsession with race, the impact of immigration, or the decline of the middle class in three hundred words. These topics have filled entire books. But by boiling down the issues to their essence, my hope is that more will read to the end-the bottom line-and discover the depth beneath the many stories too often trivialized by the media. The generalizations, finger pointing, and sloganeering that pass for news are intended to do little more than fill time and space, yet they too often keep us from the work we need to do-preparing for a future that will be very different from our past.

Bet You Didn't Know is filled with issues dear to my heart. I have been talking about them for a long time to anyone who will listen-friends, family, colleagues, readers of my American Consumers newsletter and Demo Memo blog. As you thumb through Bet You Didn't Know you will notice several themes emerging-not all of them happy, but none that can be ignored. The Internet has ended the centuries-old isolation of the United States from the rest of the world. This isolation long protected us from a variety of global pressures and allowed us to attain a far higher standard of living than anyone else. Now the protection is gone. Many of the stories on the following pages describe the consequences.

MANY THANKS

I would like to thank my longtime editor Linda Regan, who kept bugging me to write another book. You win. Thanks also to my wonderful family, a willing audience whenever I climb on the soapbox-an all-too-frequent occurrence. You were warned this project would keep me busy, and it did. Now that my yips have been captured on paper, you probably think I will shut up for a while. Sorry, no such luck. Also, thanks to my many colleagues throughout the years-from American Demographics to The Boomer Report, Money magazine, and New Strategist Publications-you made this a very fun ride. Someone once said demography was dull. It isn't anymore.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BET YOU DIDN'T KNOWby CHERYL RUSSELL Copyright © 2007 by Cheryl Russell. Excerpted by permission.
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