This is very bad for the leadership of the PRC. Collapse of a giant Ponzi scheme -- and real-estate bubbles always degenerate into Ponzi schemes irrespective of the political ideology -- typically results in a financial panic that shows how specious the prosperity was. Real estate is always attractive because it creates fixed assets whose valuation creates a wealth effect for the rest of the economy while, for the time, being less capricious than investments in manufacturing, mineral exploration, infrastructure, or retailing.
I don't know what metaphor the officially-atheist leaders of the PRC use as the equivalent of "The Good Lord isn't creating any more real estate"... but at some point, any speculation can overprice anything. If real estate gets too expensive in such an American city as Los Angeles, people in Dayton figure that they might be able to tread water by working at cashiers at Wal*Mart in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati instead of going to Greater LA to look for a job. (Really, Greater LA is mostly a horrible place in which to live). People can live in their cars or in tents, or crowd into apartments. Yes, people do that where real-estate prices are exorbitant. "Twelve in one room in A-May-REE-Caw" is exactly what one gets with a housing shortage because the places that have jobs have little new housing development except for McMansions built solely for the top 5% in income. The only good thing about those McMansions is that they are so crappily built that they will eventually be subdivided or demolished for high-density housing.
Plutocracy creates mass suffering in America. Over the last forty years that has been the dominant ideology through neoliberalism that holds that those who own the gold make the rules.
If Greater Los Angeles is to have the population of Michigan in an area that is roughly 70 miles west to east (Santa Monica to San Bernardino) and 40 miles from north to south, then its housing had better look more like that of Seoul than like South Bend -- and it cannot afford a car culture, either if people aren't to have shortened lives due to air pollution. That's my swipe at L.A. Just because much of Greater LA was orange groves in the memory of living people and that orange groves were torn up for tract housing in which everyone can have a car doesn't mean that tract houses with two-car garages and two cars in those garages (and a third parked on the lawn because the kid can't afford local housing but would never think of moving to Minneapolis because that would be too cold) or to Toledo because there are few jobs there.
The Good Lord isn't making any more real estate, but our land-use policies in America are... fecal.
......................
Who knows? Maybe the Chinese Communist Party will do what the Polish PZPR (Polish United Worker's Party, a Commie-dominated coalition) did as the economy went into the tank: stave off revolution by allowing some political pluralism that it thinks that non-Commies will mismanage badly. OK, China in 2021 has much more of a free-market economy than did Poland in 1989....
I don't know what metaphor the officially-atheist leaders of the PRC use as the equivalent of "The Good Lord isn't creating any more real estate"... but at some point, any speculation can overprice anything. If real estate gets too expensive in such an American city as Los Angeles, people in Dayton figure that they might be able to tread water by working at cashiers at Wal*Mart in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati instead of going to Greater LA to look for a job. (Really, Greater LA is mostly a horrible place in which to live). People can live in their cars or in tents, or crowd into apartments. Yes, people do that where real-estate prices are exorbitant. "Twelve in one room in A-May-REE-Caw" is exactly what one gets with a housing shortage because the places that have jobs have little new housing development except for McMansions built solely for the top 5% in income. The only good thing about those McMansions is that they are so crappily built that they will eventually be subdivided or demolished for high-density housing.
Plutocracy creates mass suffering in America. Over the last forty years that has been the dominant ideology through neoliberalism that holds that those who own the gold make the rules.
If Greater Los Angeles is to have the population of Michigan in an area that is roughly 70 miles west to east (Santa Monica to San Bernardino) and 40 miles from north to south, then its housing had better look more like that of Seoul than like South Bend -- and it cannot afford a car culture, either if people aren't to have shortened lives due to air pollution. That's my swipe at L.A. Just because much of Greater LA was orange groves in the memory of living people and that orange groves were torn up for tract housing in which everyone can have a car doesn't mean that tract houses with two-car garages and two cars in those garages (and a third parked on the lawn because the kid can't afford local housing but would never think of moving to Minneapolis because that would be too cold) or to Toledo because there are few jobs there.
The Good Lord isn't making any more real estate, but our land-use policies in America are... fecal.
......................
Who knows? Maybe the Chinese Communist Party will do what the Polish PZPR (Polish United Worker's Party, a Commie-dominated coalition) did as the economy went into the tank: stave off revolution by allowing some political pluralism that it thinks that non-Commies will mismanage badly. OK, China in 2021 has much more of a free-market economy than did Poland in 1989....
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
