Boom, Bust and Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift

David Robinson is an economics professor and dean of the Faculty of
Social Sciences at Laurentian University.

Read it. This is the one easy policy and history book that matters. As I
write this review, the book has been on the nonfiction bestseller list
for 48 weeks, dropping only recently to Number 2. Before long, everyone
who matters will be applying demographics to politics, family history,
and his or her own marriage.

Foot has made sense of Canada’s social history in the second half of
the 20th century. He argues that demographics explain two-thirds of
everything, from sexual habits to the stock market. His explanation
takes the idea of a baby boom from navel-gazing to scientific theory. It
will be a major element of the conventional wisdom of Canadians for a
long time to come. It will help us plan hospital closings, pension
plans, and investment strategies. It may help us talk to our kids about
the birds and the bees. And keep in mind that the story Foot tells is a
Canadian story—we had the loudest baby boom in the world.

Don’t think that you can get the main ideas by reading reviews. What
makes the book useful is the hundreds of brief and vivid applications of
demographic principles. And if the insights aren’t enough, there is a
chapter on real-estate markets, a chapter on “demographic
investing,” and two appendices on how to do demographic analyses for
fun and profit.