Author Daniel Stoffman co-wrote Boom, Bust & Echo with economist David Foot. The book was a phenomenon when released in 1996, selling almost 300,000 copies.
Danny Stoffman’s future was rosy from the moment of his birth in Canada in the final months of the Second World War.
He would be a toddler by the time soldiers returned and a robust Canadian economy gave rise to the baby-boom generation, a cohort against whom Mr. Stoffman and fellow wartime babies had a slight head start.
A long, successful career as an author, newspaper reporter and magazine writer culminated when he joined the economist David Foot to produce Boom, Bust & Echo, a book which used demographics to describe the past and forecast the future.
The book was a publishing phenomenon when released in 1996, eventually selling almost 300,000 copies at a time when 5,000 copies was considered a bestseller. The hardcover book spent more than two years on The Globe and Mail’s national bestseller list, while a revised paperback edition also went to No. 1 during a year-long run on this newspaper’s paperback nonfiction list.
Much of the book’s success can be attributed to Mr. Stoffman’s breezy, readable and conversational prose style, which transformed the economist’s academic rigour into bite-sized and easily digestible examples.
“Let’s keep it simple,” Prof. Foot remembers his co-author repeating again and again.
Mr. Stoffman, who has died at 78, originally interviewed the University of Toronto professor for a story on a drop in housing prices. He followed up with a 1990 feature on the economist’s research assigned by Margaret Wente for The Globe’s Report on Business Magazine.
Prof. Foot cited the demographics of an aging Canadian population to offer a preview of coming demands for business, educators and government. As a freelancer, Mr. Stoffman retained rights to the story, which generated great demand from schools and businesses in the days before widespread access to the internet. The writer sold copies at $1 each.
“I’m making good money off you,” the writer told the economist. “You should write a book.”
“I’ll only do it if I can do it with someone like you,” Prof. Foot replied.
A few days later, Mr. Stoffman telephoned to see if the professor was serious. While his original reply was a flippant one, the idea had grown on him in following days. An advance from publisher Macfarlane Walter & Ross ensured Mr. Stoffman could complete a manuscript.
The two met weekly on Tuesday mornings, the professor walking from the campus to Mr. Stoffman’s house in the Toronto neighbourhood of Seaton Village. After coffee, Prof. Foot delivered a 90-minute discourse on the topic of the day, followed by rigorous questioning by Mr. Stoffman. The latter sometimes took place while the professor relaxed on a red couch, which made him feel like a patient in a psychiatrist’s office.
The punchy title Boom, Bust & Echo described the generational cohorts the book examined: baby boomers (born from 1947 to 1966), the much smaller group of baby busters (born 1967 to 1979) and the echo, the babies of the boomers (born 1980 to 1995). The subtitle, How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift, was clearly aimed at the business market, though the book’s common-sense answers to what otherwise might be puzzling trends informed and entertained a mass general audience.
As the boomer population aged, tennis and skiing would become less popular, while demands for parks and eco-tourism would grow, as would a revival of what the co-authors called Main Street Canada as older, wealthier and more discerning boomers would abandon suburban malls to patronize neighbourhood bakeries, boutiques and butcher shops.
Daniel Stoffman reads in the living room of his Kitsilano home in Vancouver on May 8, 2015. Boom, Bust & Echo was aimed at the business market, though its common-sense answers to what otherwise might be puzzling trends informed and entertained a mass general audience.DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mail
“Demographics explains about two-thirds of everything,” the authors asserted. “They tell us a great deal about which products will be in demand in five years, and they actually predict school enrolments many years in advance. They allow us to forecast which drugs will be in fashion 10 years down the road, as well as what sorts of crimes will be on the increase. They help us to know when houses will go up in value, and when they will go down.”
The toughest year to be born? 1961. By the time they finished their education, that cohort would be competing in a job market against older baby boomers who would already have hogged the best placements.
Daniel Paul Stoffman’s birth in Winnipeg on March 14, 1945, placed him on a trajectory toward a working life with less competition than that to be faced by younger peers.
He was the first of three children born to the former Freda Green, a poet, and Dr. Isaac Wilfred Stoffman, a general practitioner who had grown up in a home in which Yiddish was the primary language. The couple lived in Yellow Grass, Sask., and then the Manitoba capital before moving to Vancouver not long after Danny’s birth.
The family settled in the city’s fashionable Oakridge neighbourhood, where the boy starred as a Little League catcher until a shattered nose convinced him to focus on more intellectual pursuits.
At age 12, he had a letter to the editor published in which he excoriated Premier W.A.C. Bennett and his Social Credit government in Victoria for ignoring a non-binding plebiscite in which Vancouver voters opted to remove a Lord’s Day Act ban on the playing of professional sports on Sundays.
“It was partly the people’s fault that they didn’t get what they voted for because they also voted for a Social Credit government,” the young correspondent wrote to the Province newspaper. “Most of my friends feel the same way. Our fathers got rid of Hitler and Mussolini. It will be our job to get rid of Bennett.”
A few years later, the boy was witness to the aftermath of a brutal stabbing murder across the street from the family home. He was awakened by screams and got to a window in time to see a man fleeing from the scene. The 15-year-old gave police a description and the man’s direction of travel, and the suspect was soon arrested while aboard a trolley bus. The boy’s witness account was published in both the city’s daily newspapers.
The romance of newsprint was also encouraged by a great uncle serving as publisher of the Daily Racing Form in New York, who provided a free subscription to the venerable tip sheet, making Danny a rare teenager on Vancouver’s wealthy westside to have a betting knowledge of horseflesh.
A sabbatical after graduating from high school took Mr. Stoffman to Europe, where he found temporary work at age 17 in a pub. When the owner realized the young Canadian was the only staffer not skimming the till, he was made manager.
After enrolling at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Stoffman joined the staff of the student newspaper. As an undergraduate, he was a part-time reporter for the Vancouver Sun, gaining his first byline at age 19 with a short feature about high school students attending a Shakespearean presentation by Holiday Theatre director Joy Coghill. The Bard is better than the Beatles, the students declared in May 1964.
While working as city editor of the student newspaper, Mr. Stoffman met the woman who would become his wife in the Ubyssey’s untidy basement office, a room whose unappealing décor was matched by a floor sticky from spilled coffee and air thick with stale cigarette smoke, and where the rat-a-tat of manual typewriters picked up pace as deadline neared.
Judy Bing, whose family left Hungary after the failed anti-Communist uprising of 1956, remembers her first visit to the grungy offices. Asked why she was there, the English major said she wanted to write stories. “Go see Dan and he will give you an assignment,” she was told before being directed to a fellow in a brown V-neck sweater and large, black-framed glasses.
The couple married in 1967, days before Mr. Stoffman began his senior year as editor of the newspaper, while she served as editor of Page Friday, the weekly arts section. Among those on staff were cartoonist Jeff Wall, later a world-famous photographer, and Gabor Maté, who became a physician and a popular author on addiction.
It was a heady time for student journalism, as antiwar activism and a loosening of social mores provided rich material for coverage. Among the visitors appearing on campus in those years were Joan Baez, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, Jefferson Airplane, Linus Pauling, John Kenneth Galbraith, and even Alexander Kerensky, the leader of Russia’s provisional government until overthrown by Lenin.
A tumultuous era also found the Ubyssey staff in a censorship battle when the newspaper reproduced four still photographs taken from a stag movie showing a naked couple in a standing embrace. The images were originally published by Playboy magazine. Vancouver mayor Tom Campbell asked the magazine’s distributor to remove four pages from an article about sex in the cinema.
“We used them [the photographs] because we think censorship is stupid and we wanted to show how stupid it was in this case,” Mr. Stoffman told the Province newspaper.
Otherwise, he added, he felt the photographs were “a pretty dull sort of thing.”
An accompanying article about censorship was written by student reporter Michael Finlay, who went on to become a legendary producer at CBC Radio before being killed earlier this year when he was subject of an unprovoked attack on a Toronto street.
While some peers became political radicals, Mr. Stoffman eschewed ideologies and considered himself to be a “radical centrist.”
After completing an undergraduate degree in Vancouver, he returned to England to attend the London School of Economics, earning a master’s degree.
The Stoffmans then moved to Toronto, where she worked for such CBC Radio programs as Ideas and As It Happens before moving on to the Toronto Star, while he spent 12 years as a feature writer and national political reporter at the Star.
He received an Atkinson Fellowship for Public Policy in 1992 to report on immigration. A decade later, his earlier work resulted in Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program – and How to Fix It. The book was a finalist for a Donner Prize.
Another book, The Money Machine: How the Mutual Fund Industry Works – and How to Make It Work For You, was nominated for a prestigious National Business Book Award in 2001. Another nominee was Chrystia Freeland, currently Canada’s finance minister, in a competition won by Naomi Klein’s No Logo.
He also wrote a book about investing (Upside Downside) and edited a collection of articles from Report on Business Magazine (Masters of Change), as well as eight commissioned corporate titles for such clients as Canadian Tire, McCain Foods, Cadillac Fairview and Boston Pizza. With his wife, he translated from the French In the Name of the Working Class, Sandor Kopacsi’s look at the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Mr. Stoffman died of pneumonia at Vancouver General Hospital on July 3. He had been living at the Louis Brier Home and Hospital after a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia. He leaves Judy, his wife of 56 years. He also leaves a son, Jacob, and a daughter, Nicole, a newspaper reporter who previously sang with Jeff Healey and the Jazz Wizards, as well as appearing on the popular television drama Degrassi Junior High. Other survivors include a sister, Phyllis Ruth, and a brother, Larry Stoffman.
Mr. Stoffman and Prof. Foot shared royalties evenly on Boom, Bust & Echo. With his unexpected windfall, Mr. Stoffman purchased his first brand-new automobile, precisely the kind of luxury a successful member of his generation might indulge in at that stage of life, according to the book.