A new report published by Boston Consulting Group says China’s economy minted over one million new US dollar millionaires in 2014. Whoa. From the South China Morning Post:
China, which added one million new millionaires last year, had the world’s second-largest such population in the world, following the United States’ seven million, according to the latest Global Wealth report released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on Monday.
Just last November, the Obama administration announced looser restrictions on Visas for Chinese tourists. That and the growing Chinese middle class has led to an explosion of transpacific tourism in the United States.
If they take a page out of their American counterpart’s book, they also might be leaving with a different way of taking notes. You’ve probably noticed the style-conscious scribbling away in darkly bound Moleskine notebooks at the coffee shop before. But as one writer has observed, the brand’s popularity is moving unpredictably into a new sphere: wealthy and well connected Americans.
From the New Yorker:
As I sat among the crowd, which was full of venture capitalists, Google and Microsoft representatives, and other tech-industry fish, I noticed something: the majority of the people in the room, whether clad in hoodies or golf shirts, were balancing on their laps not iPhones or laptops, as I might have expected, but Moleskine journals.
The author goes on, describing a phenomenon he calls “the revenge of analog”–where consumers, turned off by relentless digitalism, warm to items once considered totally obsolete. He continues:
The notion that non-digital goods and ideas have become more valuable would seem to cut against the narrative of disruption-worshipping techno-utopianism coming out of Silicon Valley and other startup hubs, but, in fact, it simply shows that technological evolution isn’t linear.
Read more on how Moleskine is positioning itself as a unique conduit for digital-only services like Evernote here.
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Moleskine photo credit: I need a strategy for this project 4/365 via photopin (license)
