I find it interesting that everyone is calling this bad management when it's indicating one thing above all:
Productivity has well exceeded the requirements of the population.
People simply don't need to work that hard anymore, but all industrialized societies, even would-be socialists, simply can't stand the idea of letting the working class have leisure time.
UBI and robust social safety nets should have started with the industrial revolution. Every time a machine, computer, or now robots, UBI should have increased and been given to more people.
I look at my own country of Portugal with a massive realestate prices bubble were more than half the youths only leave their parent's home after they're 30, more than 50% of recent graduates emigrating when they get their degrees and schools in certain areas lacking teachers because houses there are too expensive for a teacher salary, and think that maybe what China has there is actually good thing, not a bad thing.
Yeah, sure, "investors" are suffering, but why should the other 99% of people care?!
I do wonder what's going to happen to all that property as China's population hits 700,000,000 or so
A lot of developed countries are going to see a decrease in population starting in the next 20 years and that will probably go on until the end of this century.
Our growth-minded economics needs to shift. Maybe we need to focus on how to gracefully decline. A decrease in revenue does not mean a company is not profitable. So that mindset needs to change.
We really need to focus on geriatric care, there will be a lot more old people than young people, so we need some way to get care to all the old people without over-burdening the young. More robots? Or robot-assisted care so that is it not so taxing on a nurse? I recently had to help a neighbor who was in declining health and mind, and man, I do not want myself to be in that state burdening my children and family. So we need some legislature to allow assisted suicide for those with terminal illness so I can go and die with dignity and grace.
Then we need a new de-construction industry that is focused on removing old buildings and old infrastructure and restoring the land back to its natural state. Otherwise we will have a plague of urban decay if that's not managed well.
That may have been true if this resulted from the operation of a non corrupt free market, but this is instead China.
Is China having a homelessness crisis, economic collapse, or famine?
Housing does not have the conditions to be a Free Market because any one piece of land has a single owner who has the monoply of deciding what's done with it.
Sure, you can make as many houses you want ... in places were nobody wants to live because there are no jobs there ... but in practice the housing market is restricted by the ownership of land in those places were people do want to live in (have to live in, even, because the jobs are there), which means the supply of the most essential "raw material" for realestate - the actual land to build the housing in, situated were people need a place to live in - is heavilly restriced.
(In fact if you look at China's problem, with all the "ghost cities" made by the now near bankrupt building companies, they're exactly because they tried to work around that huge market barrier to entry by building cities in the middle of nowhere, were land was cheap and easilly available, on the expectation that both people and jobs would come there, and that didn't work)
Free Markets can only happen in markets were new supply can easilly come online in response to things like price increases or lowered quality by established market players, and that's markets for things like soap or teddy bears, not things were supply growth is heavilly restricted by land ownership or other similar high market barriers to entry.
Free Market Theory would only ever be applicable in markets with no or very low barriers to entry and only if market actors were rational, and Economists of the Behaviour Economics domain have proven that humans aren't rational economic actors, not even close: that pseudo-economics bollocks you're parroting is not only wholly unapplicable to the housing market (which has nowhere the low barriers to entry needed for there to de facto be freedom for market actors) but has even been disproven more than 2 decades ago (funilly enough by a guy who recently got a Nobel Prize in Economics, though for different work) when it was shown experimentally and in many different ways that homo economicus is not at all a good model for human economic behaviour.
Maybe if they actually built these things up to code it would take longer to build them in the first place. These things tend to collapse.
The world is really lucky that China's not doing that great at the moment. Not so long ago, China was winning the propaganda war internationally.
You don't want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.
Show me a single democracy anywhere in the world.
Alright I'll bite, what makes the world's declared democracies actually undemocratic in your mind?
Billionaires directly or indirectly buying elections, politicians, drafting policies, funding propaganda, regulatory capture, etc.
The democratic world doesn't start and end with America
I live in Denmark. All liberal democracies are subject to the whims of billionaires.
Edit: oh wait, you're Canadian. That's fucking hilarious.
They've hit the middle income trap while simultaneously upsetting all their trading partners. It's not going to be a pretty fall from grace. Fake numbers saying how awesome things are only work for so long.
I suspect a major reason for Putin's most recent crimes was to prevent his people learning how much their neighbours are prospering.
why dont we want that if its outperforming democracies
Ah the old “ends justify the means” argument. I’ve seen this one before somewhere
good to know Earth resources are used in rational and sustainable manner.
The half finished apartment complexes and ones that are collapsing already because they build them with bamboo instead of cement would indicate otherwise. Look up tofu-dreg projects/buildings for a good laugh. So much of the rapid construction done in the last 20-30 years in China is going to be in landfills far before it should be....
It looks like you mixed up the fields for your password and username. TL;DR: you’ve got a password-looking username
Also, I agree with your comment.
This is a feature, not a bug :)
Considering China's population shrank by nearly 1 million last year and it predicted to drop by ~700 million by 2100.
This is not going to get better.
When you make the only safe place for money real estate, then your corrupt Politicians make that only safe for the wealthy and connected, you end up with a lot of empty useless real estate.
Are you talking about China or Toronto?
Yes
Toronto is arguably an exclave of China. One could argue that Canada is now a colony of the PRC.
Nah. China's urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership's bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government's concerns about debt.
This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China's "ghost cities" circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.
There are still vast ghost cities in that country, so no they don't actually all fill up
Damn... Can't they disassemble them and ship them in the West?
No thanks, China's infrastructure is of notoriously bad quality.
For many mainland Chinese people, real estate is the only place they can invest their money. Traditionally and culturally it's also seen as the only possible way to rise up and do better.
The money export controls make it difficult for the average guy to move his money abroad as well.
So there are many Chinese people putting retirement or family savings into these places because they don't have other options.
They have also just had a very long run of easy government backed mortgage support, making it a bit too easy to borrow money for these properties.
It's crazy and doesn't make long term sense when the number of domiciles exceeds the number of people.
Can... can they move those apartments here?
I'm 99% sure they wouldn't pass a safety inspection.
This is important, not least because making the cement and steel for these surplus apartments and associated road infrastructure makes an enormous contribution to global CO~2~ emissions. Look at how the emissions took off after 2005. So the sooner the bubble bursts, the better for the climate.
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