When I was in my early 20s, I spent a summer living and working in Taipei and Hong Kong. It was a wonderful experience. I’ll never forget my apartment in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. It was a small single room with a small bed and… Read More
In the fourth quarter of last year, the average house price to earnings ratio in the UK was about 8.4x. Apparently this is about as high as it has been in the past 120 years. But interestingly enough, if you go back to the 19th… Read More
UBS and PwC’s recent report on billionaire wealth highlights some interesting trends about the global economy and global wealth. Billionaire wealth in mainland China is now second to only the United States, having grown by about 1146% from 2009 to 2020, compared to 170% in… Read More
A team of researchers at UCL recently surveyed 2,500 households across the UK to see how the design of their homes and neighborhoods has impacted their experience during lockdown (May to June 2020). Perhaps most notably, the report, called Home Comforts, found that people living… Read More
The United States and the United Kingdom recently published some official statistics on the impacts that this pandemic has had on ecommerce. The above chart is from Benedict Evans and he has some more over here. It’s worth a click through. What is clear is… Read More
Alasdair Rae is back with another set of interesting maps. This time he maps out precipitation levels across the United Kingdom and the United States using cool 3D extruded mappings. He calls them rain shadow maps. Above is showing the average annual precipitation in the… Read More
I received an email this week from a senior real estate executive who was sharing the fact that, in response to COVID, he had decided to give up driving completely. He was now cycling everywhere — whether for work or for personal errands. And it… Read More
It’s interesting to think about the psychology behind this FT chart outlining consumer spending in the United Kingdom from March to early July. You can see the initial panic buying of groceries in late March (well, food and toilet paper). And you can more or… Read More
This is an interesting business story. Deliveroo is a London-based online food delivery company that was founded back in 2013 and today accounts for a big chunk of the online restaurant platform market in the UK. (They are also developing a network of “ghost kitchens”… Read More
Just over a month ago, as North America was beginning its lockdown, the Europeans were the ones showing us how to stay sane in quarantine through balcony orchestras and viral internet videos. Now we’re looking to them for how best to reopen the economy and… Read More
