For a while last year it looked as though the widening of inequalities of all kinds, which has been one of the hallmarks of the pandemic, might not extend to housing. Demand for short-term and holiday lets on platforms such as Airbnb collapsed. In London, rents fell fast. For once, perhaps, the scales could be tipping away from the UK’s two million landlords and towards the 13 million people who rent from them.

The predictable result has now arrived, in the shape of a pandemic-driven property boom. Two weeks ago, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, described the UK’s housing market as being “on fire”. Prices are rising at an average rate of 14.2% annually in rural locations, and 7% in cities.

Demand for second and holiday homes is not the only reason why the housing market in such places increasingly resembles a hot-air balloon. Well-off city dwellers are more likely than any other group to have worked from home over the past year. Some are now choosing to move house, either for a change of scene or more space. But demand for holiday homes is a key factor driving price rises, and forcing local people to vacate desirable areas such as south-western seaside towns and villages so that richer visitors can take their places, either as owners or short-term renters.

The housing problems faced by renters and would-be first time buyers long predate the pandemic. The transformation of homes into assets, and of the majority of households into property investors, has been a policy of governments since Margaret Thatcher. But the economic and social upheavals of the past year have brought about a new twist, as people venture further afield to spend the money they have made on the highest-value homes in London and the south-east. Being priced out has long been understood as a generational injustice, as house prices have floated beyond the reach of young adults without inherited wealth.

In the shadow of the pandemic, its geographical aspect has grown sharper too. There are economic as well as environmental reasons to support an expansion of domestic tourism. While second homes that are rarely used are rightly viewed as undesirable, especially in locations where they cluster together, seasonal variation is part of the rhythm of life in holiday towns. But while visitors come and go, locals need homes. Ensuring that the supply of affordable housing is increased, and secured long term, must be the primary goal of any housing and planning reforms. The alternative is increasing injustice and division.

According to legend, Aesculapius bore two daughters, Panacea and Hygeia, who gave rise to dynasties of healers and hygienists. The division remains today, in clinical training and in practice; and, because of the imperative nature of medical care and the subtlety of health care, the former has tended to dominate. Preventive medicine has as its primary objective the maintenance and promotion of health. It accomplishes this by controlling or manipulating environmental factors that affect health and disease. For example, in California presently there is serious suffering and substantial economic loss because of the failure to introduce controlled fluoridation of public water supplies. Additionally, preventive medicine applies preventive measures against disease by such actions as immunization and specific nutritional measures. Third, it attempts to motivate people to adopt healthful lifestyles through education.

For the most part, curative medicine has as its primary objective the removal of disease from the patient. It provides diagnostic techniques to identify the presence and nature of the disease process. While these may be applied on a mass basis, they are usually applied after the patient appears with a complaint. Second, it applies treatment to the sick patient. In every case, this is, or should be, individualized according to the particular need of each patient. Third, it utilizes rehabilitation methodologies to return the treated patient to the best possible level of functioning.

While it is true that both preventive medicine and curative medicine require cadres of similarly trained personnel such as planners, administrators, and educators, the underlying delivery systems depend on quite distinctive professional personnel. The requirements for curative medicine call for clinically trained individuals who deal with patients on a one-to-one basis and whose training is based primarily on an understanding of the biological, pathological, and psychological processes that determine an individual’s health and disease status. Preventive medicine, on the other hand, calls for a very broad spectrum of professional personnel, few of whom require clinical expertise.

The economic differences between preventive medicine and curative medicine have been extensively discussed, perhaps most convincingly by Winslow in the monograph The Cost of Sickness and the Price of Health. Sickness is almost always a negative, nonproductive and harmful state. All resources expended to deal with sickness are therefore fundamentally economically unproductive. Health, on the other hand, has a very high value in our culture. To the extent that healthy members of the population are replaced by sick members, the economy isdoubly burdened. Nevertheless, the per capita cost of preventive measures for specific diseases is generally far lower than the per capita cost of curative medicine applied to treatment of the same disease.

There is an imperative need to provide care for the sick person within a single medical care system, but there is no overriding reason why a linkage is necessary between the two components of a health care system, prevention and treatment. A national health and medical care program composed of semiautonomous systems for personal health care and medical care would have the advantage of clarifying objectives and strategies and of permitting a more equitable division of resources between prevention and cure.

Transatlantic friction between companies and regulators has grown as Europe’s data guardians have become more assertive. Francesca Bignami, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, says that the explosion of digital technologies has made it impossible for watchdogs to keep a close eye on every web company operating in their backyard. So instead they are relying more on scapegoating prominent wrongdoers in the hope that this will deter others.

But regulators such as Peter Schaar, who heads Germany’s federal data-protection agency, say thegulfis exaggerated. Some European countries, he points out, now have rules that make companies who suffer big losses of customer data to report these to the authorities. The inspiration for these measures comes from America.

Yet even Mr. Schaar admits that the internet’s global scale means that there will need to be changes on both sides of the Atlantic. He hints that Europe might adopt a more flexible regulatory stance if America were to create what amounts to an independent data-protection body along European lines. In Europe, where the flagship Data Protection Directive came into effect in 1995, the European Commission is conducting a review of its privacy policies. In America Congress has begun debating a new privacy bill and the Federal Trade Commission is considering an overhaul of its rules.

Even if America and Europe do narrow their differences, internet firms will still have to struggle with other data watchdogs. In Asia countries that belong to APEC are trying to develop a set of regional guidelines for privacy rules under an initiative known as the Data Privacy Pathfinder. Some countries such as Australia and New Zealand have longstanding privacy laws, but many emerging nations have yet to roll out fully fledged versions of their own. Mr. Polonetsky sees Asia as “a new privacy battleground”, with America and Europe both keen to tempt countries towards their own regulatory model.

Canada already has something of a hybrid privacy regime, which may explain why its data-protection commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has been so influential on the international stage. She marshaled the signatories of the Google Buzz letter and took Facebook to task last year for breaching Canada’s data privacy laws, which led the company to change its policies.

Ms Stoddart argues that American companies often trip up on data-privacy issues because of “their brimming optimism that the whole world wants what they have rolled out in America.” Yet the same optimism has helped to create global companies that have brought huge benefits to consumers, while also presenting privacy regulators with tough choices. Shoehorning such firms into old privacy frameworks will not benefit either them or their users.

“No age jokes tonight, all right?” quipped Sir Mick Jagger, the 73-year-old front man of the Rolling Stones, as he welcomed the crowds to Desert Trip Music Festival in California last October. The performers’ average age was just one year below Sir Mick’s, justifying his description of the event as “the Palm Springs Retirement Home for British Musicians”.

Globally, a combination of falling birth rates and increasing lifespans will increase the “old-age dependency ratio” from 13% in 2015 to 38% by the end of the century. To listen to the doomsayers, this could lead not just to labour shortages but to economic stagnation, asset-market meltdowns, huge fiscal strains and a dearth of innovation.

From the start of the 20th century survival rates in old age started to improve markedly, a trend that continues today. The UN estimates that between 2010 and 2050 the number of over-85s globally will grow twice as much as that of the over-65s, and 16 times as much as that of everyone else.

Warnings about a “silver time bomb” or “grey tsunami” have been sounding for the past couple of decades, and have often been couched in terms of impending financial disaster and intergenerational warfare. Barring a rise in productivity on a wholly unlikely scale, it is economically unsustainable to pay out generous pensions for 30 years or more to people who may have been contributing to such schemes only for a similar amount of time. But this special report will argue that the longer, healthier lives that people in the rich world now enjoy can be aboon, not just for the individuals concerned but for the economies and societies they are part of. The key to unlocking this longevity dividend is to turn the over-65s into more active economic participants.

This starts with acknowledging that many of those older people today are not in fact “old” in the sense of being worn out, sick and inactive. Yet in most countries the age at which people retire has barely shifted over the past century. When Bismarck brought in the first formal pensions in the 1880s, payable from age 65, life expectancy in Prussia was 45. Today in the rich world 90% of the population live to celebrate their 65th birthday, mostly in good health, yet that date is still seen as the starting point of old age.

This year the peak cohort of American baby-boomers turns 60. As they approach retirement in unprecedented numbers, small tweaks to retirement ages and pensions will no longer be enough. This special report will argue that a radically different approach to ageing and life after 65 is needed.

It doesn’t take long to walk from Siemens’s old headquarters in Munich to its new one: the German industrial conglomerate has built it right next door. The design is cutting-edge, as are the building’s environmental features. It is packed with energy-saving sensors; channelled rainwater is used to flush the toilets. General Electric, Siemens’s big American rival, will soon have a new base, too. Its building will also boast plenty of green technology, such as a huge canopy made of solar panels.

The two industrial giants aren’t so much showing off as signaling transformation. Both firms are going through the most profound change in their corporate histories, attempting to switch from being makers of machines into fully digital businesses.

It is tempting to bracket the firms together for other reasons, too. Siemens, in contrast, excels in product design and factory automation. It already has experience in digitising the entire life cycle of an industrial product, from design to fabrication, so it is in some ways already more of an IT firm than GE.

It is no surprise, then, that the two firms are also taking very different paths towards digitization. GE is completely reinventing itself, whereas Siemens is staying close to its roots. What works best will be closely watched by other companies in all sorts of industries. They want to know what happens when operating technology, as represented by GE and Siemens, properly meets information technology.

GE’s answer has been to invest billions since 2011 in a data platform called Predix. It wants the system to become for machines what Android is for smartphones. Siemens’s digital transformation appears to be going more slowly. Only recently did it begin marketing MindSphere, its equivalent to Predix, more intensively.

Siemens’s attitude to its industrial customers’ data may also work better than GE’s. Whereas individual consumers are by and large willing to give up personal information to one platform, such as Google or Facebook, most companies try to avoid such lock-in. Whether they are makers of machine tools or operators of a factory, they jealously guard their data because they know how much they are worth. Both GE and Siemens say their customers will keep control of their data in the new digitized world of their data in the new is who will own the algorithms that are generated using these data. GE claims ownership; Siemens is much lesscategorical.

It is thus unlikely that a single platform will come to dominate the industrial Internet. Nonetheless GE seems better prepared for a digital future. The firm now has a flexible organization that can change course quickly. Siemens, by contrast, is still living in a more closed vertical world. Both new headquarters feature small museums displaying the firms’ roots. No prize for guessing which one you can visit strictly by appointment only.