News & Insights

Few industries were as hard hit as the automotive sector during the pandemic. Supply chain disruptions, most specifically a shortage of semiconductor chips, sent production levels plummeting across the globe. Here in the U.S., new vehicle inventories fell from just over 3.5 million in early 2020 to below 1.0 million in the summer of 2021 […]

Since the summer of 2021, housing affordability has declined at the sharpest rate in 25 years. The situation has not gotten any better recently. Affordability can be estimated from three moving parts: mortgage rates, home prices, and household income. A common way to think about it is how much of your monthly income is eaten […]

Are we collectively reading more than we used to, or less? Most would probably guess less, and so would I, which is why I was surprised to read in one of Kevin Kelly’s books that “The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980.” I haven’t found anything to back up Kevin […]

That’s a stupid question. Of course, I know the year I was born. I know how old I am. Yes, you do indeed know how old you are chronologically, but your mind can play games and the age you feel in your head is not necessarily the age on your birth certificate. Jennifer Senior writing […]

What do you get when you take 724 individuals and regularly track their health and happiness over eight decades? One, you get the world’s longest-running study on human happiness, known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Two, you get a riveting view into the most basic of human questions: What makes a good life? […]

Anyone looking to buy a house is aware of how big an impact mortgage rates have on monthly payments. At the start of 2021, rates were as low as 2.75% only to climb to above 7% last fall. For the median home in Vermont, a 2.75% mortgage works out to a monthly payment of $1,200. […]

In the spirit of transparency, it’s time to “fess up” to things we whiffed on in the past. First up, Globalization. With the publishing of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree in 1999, globalization became a force of nature, impossible to stop and beneficial for everyone. Ugh, we got that wrong. Today globalization […]

On the surface there are big differences between youth unemployment rates in the U.S. and China. In China, the rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is over 20%. For recent college grads in the U.S., it is only 4%, although to be fair, it jumps to 9% for 16 to 19-year-olds — still only about half […]

If you have spent much time with anyone under the age of 30 the last few years, you can be forgiven for thinking that online shopping is taking over the retail world. The shift to e-commerce accelerated during the pandemic as even the most digitally unaware worked to avoid in-person contact. In 2020, for example, […]

“Let’s go and invent tomorrow rather than worry about yesterday,” Steve Jobs once boldly declared. “Show me a problem, and I’ll look for a technology to fix it,” said Bill Gates. These words, and many like them from other tech luminaries, perfectly capture the techno-optimism that has become so ascendant today – a shared vision […]

Every year at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett gives shareholders insights into his investment thinking and keys to long-term success. At the May meeting, Buffett observed that over the past 58 years he has made only a dozen or so truly great decisions. This works out to about one every five years. You […]