Instead of misspending my youth justifying membership in the wrong crowd I should have been studying to be an ophthalmologist? Or a dental technician. But back when I eschewed academic advancement in favour of drinking for Essex I thought very little about demography. Our generation bifurcated quite nicely along the lines of mod or rocker, hippie or skinhead.

I’m sure that right now, false teeth fitters, opticians and chiropodists are scooping up the two-up-two-down Suffolk cottages me and the wife have circled in the Guardian’s “Downsizing” homes section for our genteel if penurious retirement. And driving prices so that the proceeds from our Canadian real estate would barely afford a bathroom reno in a des. res. in Dedham.

The Globe And Mail’s Doug Saunders recently wrote about Hania Zlotnik, the lady who heads up the UN population division and who holds real answers to really important questions – like third world poverty. Demography is wonderfully concrete and revealing information. And of course it holds equally valuable clues for those of us who huck beer or biscuits for a living.

Back in 1996 demographer David Foote of the University of Toronto published Boom Bust & Echo. In it he demystified the marketing shibboleths that companies like Yankelovich would share with clients for about the price of a 2-bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto.

In 1966 the vanguard of the baby boom hit 20, while the last of them were babes in arms. Hardly surprising then that beer was the biggest game in town from 1966 to 1986 as hordes of spotty faced lads surged through adolescence on a tsunami of testosterone. And that, 25 years on, beer plays second fiddle to wines and spirits, eyewear, adult diapers and prepaid cemetery plots, now that the younger boomers’ kids are growing up and we older ones are reluctantly but inexorably fading to black.

Trying to decode the human mind is a mugs’ game. A recent survey says that the most trusted name in US news is FOX. Meanwhile Forbes declares the most trusted celebrities to be the likes of Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington. Well, for all we know Hanks regularly snorts coke off hookers’ tits and gives the little woman a good slapping once in a while. We know nothing about these men. People trust the roles they play in movies. Which is ineffably sad.

It doesn’t take a PhD in demography to understand that an aging population would follow Snap, Crackle and Pop if they could be depended upon to condemn every threat to the comfy status quo, give voice to their righteous indignation at anyone who appears to be doing better than them in the life lottery, and chivvy the President for spending tax money on healthcare for the poor. And having shucked off the cocoon of religion in which their ancestors found solace and having spent their days acquiring everything and learning nothing, the only models for good are celluloid images of men playing soldiers or impersonating stout souls.

Getting to the bottom of the bizarre and labyrinthine processes by which people arrive at how and what they think is the work of many lifetimes. Predicting what they need is considerably easier and probably a whole lot more profitable.