The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece about “Silicon Valley invading Toronto” is, in my view, describing a generally positive outcome. We are one of the largest cities in North America (the exact ranking depends on where you draw the urban boundaries). We have more enlightened… Read More
Here’s a chart from Knight Frank’s 2019 Global Affordability Monitor that I think you’ll find interesting: It compares real home price growth and real household income growth (after tax) over the last 5 years for 32 world cities. The bolded percentages represent the former and… Read More
I just came across this chart from Axios, which relies on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Kaiser Family Foundation. It compares median household income against the average cost of employer health insurance (in the United States). What it is… Read More
A recent study and research paper by the MIT Senseable City Lab — called, Tasty Data — has discovered that restaurant data alone can be used to accurately predict location-based factors such as daytime population, nighttime population, number of businesses, and overall consumer spending within… Read More
Last year, 5 economists published a research paper called “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers.” The authors are 2 economists employed by Uber; 2 professors at Stanford University; and the chairman of the University of Chicago’s… Read More
Emily Badger’s recent piece on “how ‘developer’ became such a dirty word” has been getting passed around within the industry over the last few days. I had a chuckle when I read this bit: The notion that development is inherently bad, or that developers are… Read More
Benedict Evan’s most recent blog post, called “Amazon as experiment,” draws some interesting parallels between what Amazon is doing today (and experimenting with) and the beginning of mass retail, namely the invention of the department store. He also talks about some of the shortcomings of… Read More
Fred Wilson wrote a post this morning about the “certainty of close.” He was talking about fundraising for startups, but similar parallels can be drawn to other aspects of life and business. The point Fred makes is that if you can live with the “bird… Read More
This recent NY Times article — which makes the case that the current protests in Hong Kong are at least partially a result of inequality — has a pair of interesting diagrams that speak to the city’s tight housing market. The first compares average living… Read More
The below chart from this morning’s Wall Street Journal is perhaps a good example of our ongoing transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy. Just four stocks — namely Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — have accounted for 19% of the S&P 500’s… Read More
