Demographics, once a dreary academic pursuit, has recently become an alternative form of astrology. Both disciplines are founded on the notion that people born at the same time will undergo similar experiences; both promise to explain everything, to predict the future. Chips & Pop: Decoding the Nexus Generation, by a group of young marketing consultants from Toronto, is likely to horrify serious scholars, mystify the general reader, and possibly find an audience among business people who want to sell things to people in their 20s.

Chips & Pop refers to the microchip and popular culture, and this book is presented as a study of the “generation” that has grown up surrounded by these two powerful influences. Of course, this is not a generation in the conventional or scholarly sense of the word, as it encompasses everyone from their late teens to those in their late 30s, or more than a quarter of the population of Canada. Still, the authors give this group a name – “the Nexus generation,” which they describe as a friendlier alternative to “Generation X.”

Readers seeking any sort of scholarly or scientific insight will be disappointed. The authors gather their information from a small list of books, many of them demographics-related bestsellers of recent years, from a set of opinion surveys conducted by a polling firm, for which no information is provided on sample size, makeup or accuracy, and from e-mail correspondence with a group of 150 young people they call the d~Coders, which appears to be a network of friends and associates across Canada. No information is provided on the makeup of this group, either, though it appears to consist mainly of middle-class, college educated people. There are no control groups or comparisons with other population groups, so it is often difficult to tell what is unique to this “generation” and what is merely true of people in the 1990s.

It is equally hard to separate the traits of “Nexus” from the universal characteristics of people in this age group. Is this generation the first to experience rootlessness in career moves, or has this always been true of people in their late teens, 20s, and 30s? The authors attempt to deal with this problem with a concept they call “generational genes,” but the distinction is not adequately explained.

Beyond the book’s awkward methodology and sweeping generalizations, later chapters offer much more modest and potentially valuable management advice with suggestions for executives dealing with younger consumers and employees. “Nexus” is a group of people who are more willing to go into debt than their predecessors, more willing to trust machines with their money, more comfortable with multiculturalism, and less inured to government agencies. Chips & Pop would have been far more successful if it had stuck to such insights, expanded upon them with more nuts-and-bolts advice, and avoided grandiose themes.