“People 50 and older hold the vast majority of wealth in the country, but we’re producing products and services for people who don’t have nearly as much money to spend…”
by Alexander Gelfand
April 27, 2023: Thanks to advances in medicine and public health, people are living longer, healthier lives. The world’s population of people 60 and older is growing five times faster than the population as a whole. Global life expectancy has doubled since 1900, and experts say that children born in developed countries now have a good chance of living to 100.
A “silver tsunami” is already sweeping the U.S. labor force: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 36% of people ages 65–69 will remain on the job in 2024 — up significantly from the 22% who were working in 1994.
These longer-lived, longer-working individuals generate an ever-bigger slice of global GDP and control an expanding tranche of global wealth. In her recent book Stage (Not Age), Golden estimates that the “longevity economy” is worth more than $22 trillion — $8.3 trillion in the United States alone.
That may be a conservative figure: AARP (the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons) estimates that people over 50 already account for half of consumer spending worldwide, or $35 trillion. (This range of figures may have to do with how “older adult” is defined: The term is variously used to refer to people over the ages of 65, 60, or — sorry, Gen Xers — 50.)
COTSWOLD LIFE MAGAZINE – MAY 2023: The issue features the folklore, sayings and celebrations of Maytime; 24-hours in Burford; @Benfogle on health scares, hope & homesickness; from Elgar to Beatlemania at @AbbeyRoad; an illustrated guide to #Uley; a folkloric walk by the River Severn.
Insider Business (April 21, 2023) – For generations, farmers in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir have been selling their crops on the Dal Lake in a floating market. The lake is an economic hub for people living there – with many working in agriculture, fishing, and tourism. But decades of pollution have threatened their livelihoods.
The floating vegetable market on Dal Lake is in Srinagar, Kashmir, where locals trade out of their canoes. The produce sold here is grown in floating gardens.. The rich ecosystem of this wetland produces plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, water chestnuts and the famous nadru (lotus roots, a delicacy in the Kashmir Valley).
They gather in the centre of the lake at dawn, and disappear just as sunlight hits the waters.
Insider Business (April 4, 2023) – Purple flowers in Kashmir produce the world’s most expensive spice — saffron. While it can sell for $10,000 per kilogram, climate change is making it even more expensive. Because of lower-than-usual rainfall over the last few years, production has dropped significantly.
And fields that once yielded this delicate spice have become sites for new housing construction. Climate change is threatening the production of all kinds of foods from cloves in India to eels in Japan and Spain. Here are 10 expensive, and vulnerable, foods and why climate change is making them so much more expensive.
CNBC Marathon reviews why a cost-of-living crisis is unfolding across America’s housing infrastructure. CNBC explores what that means for apartments in the cities and houses in the suburbs. Inflation data shows that costs for items such as rent and groceries are increasing quickly across the Sun Belt and coastal cities.
Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:39 How to make the suburbs more affordable (Published April. 2022) 13:22 How suburban sprawl shapes the U.S. economy (Published Feb. 2022) 26:34 Are major cities still worth it? (Published May 2022)
Now years removed from the darkest days of the pandemic, people are asking: Is a return to the city worth it? Metropolitan regions have sprawled in recent years, raising budget concerns and quality-of-life issues for the people who remain downtown. Meanwhile the absence of commuters is slowing the recovery in leisure and hospitality. About 46% of renters in the U.S. are struggling to make ends meet, according to Harvard University researchers.
Builders say conditions for renters will get worse before they get better. A snarled supply chain, a labor shortage, and rising interest rates are worsening what some call a “throwaway” development pattern. Several real estate industry experts have ideas about how to make housing more attainable. Some of the most popular ideas include mixed-use districts and master-planned communities.
America’s suburbs are sprawling again. Over the 20th century, real estate developers built large tracts of single-family homes outside of major cities. The builders were following mortgage underwriting standards first introduced by the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s. Over the century, those guidelines created housing market conditions that explicitly shut out many minorities. Experts say it is possible to update these old building codes to create equity while fixing some, but not all of the problems of American suburbia. CNBC Marathon brings together the best of CNBC’s coverage on the U.S. housing crisis and how life in the suburbs impacts city living.
Can the aging process be reversed – or even halted, altogether? If we manage to decode this final mystery of our human biology, we might soon be able to eradicate age-related illnesses like cancer, dementia and heart problems. The race to invent the miracle pill is well underway.
Today, international researchers are getting astonishingly close to realizing humanity’s dream of immortality. The hunt for immortality gained traction with the discovery of Costa Rica’s so-called “Blue Zone,” by Luis Rosero-Bixby. In the “Blue Zone,” on the Nicoya Peninsular, he found a remarkable number of centenarians.
Here, male life expectancy is the highest in the world. Their healthy lifestyle is one factor, but the promise of longevity is probably also because their telomeres – sections of DNA found at the end of chromosomes – are longer than those of the average person. It’s a field of research currently being explored by Maria Blasco in Madrid.
But this is just one of many possible factors influencing the process of aging. Senescent cells may also play a key role. Also known as “zombie cells”, these attack our body in old age and flood it with alarm signals until, at some point, we collapse under their weight. That’s a theory proposed by another researcher in Spain, Manuel Serrano. A billion-dollar industry is already knocking impatiently at the lab doors.
The first to market the miracle pill is guaranteed incredible wealth. That’s why investors are sponsoring young bio-startups in Hong Kong. Keen not be left out, US Big Tech is vying for the world’s best scientists. Alex Zhavoronkov has secured a slice of that pie, with a cash injection of more than 250 million dollars for his company’s work on aging research. Whereas some pioneers’ visions burst like bubbles, others rush to get other, rather more dubious products onto the market. But their efficacy is now measurable.
The epigenetic clock devised by Steve Horvath can measure our biological age, regardless of our actual age in years. With his research on the thymus gland, California’s Greg Fahy managed to not only decelerate the aging process, but reverse it. His initial study on humans showed that a particular drug cocktail took an average two-and-a-half years off their age.
Young biohackers like Nina Khera from Boston want everyone to benefit from this research. Together with friends, she’s working on the “epigenetic clock for all”. But while we’re busy trying to counter the aging process and all the illnesses it entails, fundamental questions arise: Should we be messing with nature like this? Are we about to overwhelm the planet with more and more people? Criminal biologist Mark Benecke in Cologne says that these questions are coming far too late.
A cost-of-living crisis is unfolding in U.S. major cities. Inflation data shows that costs for items such as rent and groceries are increasing quickly across the Sun Belt and coastal superstar cities. Now years removed from the darkest days of the pandemic, people are asking: Is a return to the city worth it?
Metropolitan regions have sprawled in recent years, raising budget concerns and quality-of-life issues for the people who remain downtown. Meanwhile the absence of commuters is slowing the recovery in leisure and hospitality. Many renters believe that a cost-of-living crisis is brewing in America’s major cities.
New York City is showing up as a hotspot of rent inflation. The average rent for 1-bedroom apartments in Manhattan rose to $3,995 a month in May 2022 — a 41% increase from one year ago, according to Zumper. Sudden, double-digit rent spikes are hitting other hubs, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas. Zumper data shows that growth is particularly strong in Sun Belt cities such as Miami, where rents have risen to $2,700 a month in May 2022, a 64% increase from a year prior. During the pandemic, workers left the largest U.S. cities.
Two years in, renters have returned but many commuters haven’t as companies negotiate the particulars of a return to the office. Public officials are concerned about lagging transit ridership in cities such as New York. Ed Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University, says cities are becoming more important — not less — in the age of remote work. “When you Zoom to work, you miss the opportunity to watch the people who are older, to watch what they’ve done and to learn from them,” he told CNBC in an interview.
But for renters, a return to increasingly expensive cities might seem like a raw deal, especially if they can do their jobs from home. Researchers say remote work limits firms’ ability to train new workers. Data produced by Microsoft’s workforce suggests that it is more difficult to share in-depth information remotely, which can produce silos within companies’ rank and file.
“A lot of these tech companies, they’re saying you can work remotely,” said Andra Ghent, a professor of finance at the University of Utah. “But, you know, in many cases, they’re also saying, like, we’re not going to pay you quite the same amount.” Many renters believe that a cost-of-living crisis is brewing in America’s major cities. New York City is showing up as a hotspot of rent inflation. The average rent for 1-bedroom apartments in Manhattan rose to $3,995 a month in May 2022 — a 41% increase from one year ago, according to Zumper.
Sudden, double-digit rent spikes are hitting other hubs, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas. Zumper data shows that growth is particularly strong in Sun Belt cities such as Miami, where rents have risen to $2,700 a month in May 2022, a 64% increase from a year prior. During the pandemic, workers left the largest U.S. cities. Two years in, renters have returned but many commuters haven’t as companies negotiate the particulars of a return to the office.
Public officials are concerned about lagging transit ridership in cities such as New York. Ed Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University, says cities are becoming more important — not less — in the age of remote work. “When you Zoom to work, you miss the opportunity to watch the people who are older, to watch what they’ve done and to learn from them,” he told CNBC in an interview. But for renters, a return to increasingly expensive cities might seem like a raw deal, especially if they can do their jobs from home.
Researchers say remote work limits firms’ ability to train new workers. Data produced by Microsoft’s workforce suggests that it is more difficult to share in-depth information remotely, which can produce silos within companies’ rank and file. “A lot of these tech companies, they’re saying you can work remotely,” said Andra Ghent, a professor of finance at the University of Utah. “But, you know, in many cases, they’re also saying, like, we’re not going to pay you quite the same amount.”
Monocle’s 150th issue is a humour special that also includes an interview with Finland’s prime minister Sanna Marin and celebrates ambitious city halls that inspire the metropolises they serve. Order your copy now: https://t.co/jsgQz1X4WHpic.twitter.com/7wNYPZqTYt
Called Riva, the new tower will be a residential building built on top of the existing office block, retaining the iconic reconstruction architecture of this building. The office completed the final design of the building.
Situated along the coast of Hong Kong, SmartZendo apartment was designed to bring Zen ideas into a small home. In redesigning the home, architect Patrick Lam converted a chaotic, awkward space into a mindful experience of modern living, using Zen’s focus to draw the scenery outside into the home.
Creating an open living area allowed the addition of a raised floor, containing additional storage hidden by hatches, as well as a raisable coffee table embedded in the floor. This also allowed the relocation of the kitchen from an irregularly shaped room into the living area, and the addition of a series of timber panels that can divide the living space into a sleeping area.
Smart hardware and appliances complete the home, reducing clutter and encouraging dual purpose use of furniture and cabinetry throughout.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 