2030

they happen to own at least half of the net worth globally—around 80 percent in the United States. They’re the population above the age of sixty, and by 2030 the world will have 400 million more of them, mostly in Europe, North America, and China.

Le Corbusier launched modernist architecture by eliminating walls to create large open spaces, letting windows run the full length of a building’s façade, and exposing the intrinsic elegance of steel, glass, and cement without attempting to hide it behind superfluous ornaments. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,” Marcel Proust once wrote, “but in having new eyes.”

The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed that in many areas of life we make bad decisions because our thinking is clouded by the “loss aversion bias.” After conducting many experiments, they concluded that people have a tendency to prefer avoiding losses rather than locking in equivalent gains. As surprising as it may seem, most people find it more attractive to avoid losing $10 than to win $10.

In rich countries, it makes the most economic sense to deploy technology to replace jobs that require intermediate skill levels, precisely because the wages are high enough to provide an incentive for automation and the tasks are relatively easy to automate

Even taking into consideration the vastness of the African deserts, the continent contains the most undeveloped yet fertile land for agricultural development on the planet

By 2030 China will have 90 million fewer people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five and 150 million more people above the age of sixty.

Economic development is the best contraceptive

Most of China’s fertility decline cannot be attributed to the one-child policy.” The slowdown was driven by people’s decisions under changing circumstances, not by government bureaucrats. “The one-child campaign was based on politics and pseudo-science, rather than on necessity, much less on good demography,” the experts concluded

More women now graduate from high school, and more of them go on to get a college education. Back in the fifties about 7 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had a college degree, half the rate of men. Nowadays, the proportion of women with a college degree is nearly 40 percent, while for men the figure is only 32 percent

Airbnb wouldn’t be so successful if it weren’t for a number of converging trends: declining fertility, longer life expectancy, doubts about the future viability of public pensions, expanded use of smartphones and apps, and a growing interest in sharing rather than owning. I