Chongqing seems incredible on pictures and YouTube videos. No doubt it's a comfortable place to live for many people, and surely it isn't perfect, especially when it comes to things like air pollution.
What amazes me is China's capacity to do development on a large scale, something that's completely missing in Europe. If we had efficient large-scale construction solved, we could really put a dent in the cost of living crisis, and reverse the overcrowding of the existing urban centers.
It’s missing in most European places because there’s little need for it.
When there is a need, Europe does pretty well. At least relative to the U.S.
For example, Europe built the completely novel floodgates for Venice. It’s been very successful as far as I’m aware when it was heavily doubted before and throughout its development.
On the other hand, the U.S. won’t even contemplate building something similar to protect NYC, despite the fact that Europe has already done it and proven the concept, and that the region this would protect is orders of magnitude more economically valuable than Venice.
Similarly consider high speed rail. Italy completely revolutionized domestic travel by setting up excellent high speed rail over a few years. They did it not by government fiat but intelligent regulations paired with privatization and market rules.
While it’s not China scale, it’s more than sufficient for Italy’s scale.
At the same time the U.S. is completely incapable of creating high speed rail and to the extent it has its done so by redefining it down.
Both have large populations, but have entirely different histories and cultures and economies.
Thailand, the UK, and Tanzania have similar populations, that does not mean they are useful comparisons. What about Sri Lanka and Australia, or Syria and Taiwan?
The dialectic is only valuable when comparing things that arent the same. the difference in their economy is the point, the difference in their history is how they got here.
US infrastructure is increasingly terrible, true. But high-speed rail isn't probably what I'd point to as the most glaring problem. No doubt the TGV and Shinkansen are impressive, but the longest route in Japan (Tokyo-Aomori) is 675km compared to 4000km from Los Angeles to NYC (assuming you could it make a straight line, which you couldn't). Not to say I wouldn't be delighted to even have service from San Diego to Seattle, a mere 1800km.
I think of this, every time it takes me more than 4 hours to "fly" 150 miles to the Chicago airport, when you count all of the overhead at the two ends, plus average delays and cancellations.
The longest high-speed line is 2,760 km (in China; Beijing to Kunming). I actually don't think an LA to NYC line is _that_ absurd an idea; at 350km/h you'd do it in 11 hours (in practice somewhat more with stops). But east coast and west coast lines would be more plausible.
You can just switch trains in Tokyo and continue on to Fukuoka on the Nozomi Shinkansen. That's another 1000km. 8 hours travel time, with a 10 minute layover is quite nice, I've taken most of that ride (Aomori to Hiroshima). That would be like what, Miami to NY? Or Houston to Chicago.
If you’re going to do HSR you have to think smaller than coast-to-coast. Think of that as the final stretch goal from a well laid out network spanning the places that it makes sense because past a certain distance you’re never going to outcompete airplanes and we have an extensive array of airports all across the country. Even Los Angeles to San Francisco should have been the stretch goal rather than the original goal, with the original goal to build Los Angeles to San Diego, Los Angeles to Las Vegas, then Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles to Bakersfield.
Maybe in parallel you could also: improve the trackways between San Francisco and San Jose, maybe build Sacramento to San Francisco, Sacramento to Stockton (and maybe extend that to San Jose and Fresno, with a San Jose to Santa Cruz stretch goal). Other stretch goals: Sacramento to Redding, Fresno to Bakersfield.
Instead we’re building the Central Valley segment first, in part due to the insistence of the Obama administration when Los Angeles to San Diego would have made way more sense and been up and running and in revenue service sooner.
But the thing is, I don't need a train from LA to NYC - I just need one from SEA<-->PDX. Or one from Boise <--> SLC. You could connect key cities within a region and it would be game changing. Living in WA if I had GEG<-->SEA or PSC <--> SEA and GEG<-->PSC - you could completely shift the housing problem etc.
> Europe built the completely novel floodgates for Venice
That's wild! How do you convince people in Latvia or Norway that they should help pay for infrastructure like that in Italy?
If Manhattan wants flood gates, NY will have to build them. At some point, they will probably have to because the cost of insurance will exceed the cost of the bonds needed to build.
There are typically federal grants for major infrastructure projects. The Hoover Dam, for example, was entirely paid for by federal dollars. Many bridges also have federal backing and the interstate highway system is subsidized. This is because good infrastructure helps increase the GDP and benefits everyone in the country.
The European Investment Bank provided €1.5b of funding.¹ EIB decisions don’t generally attract lots of attention from member states other than those concerned, since it is generally understood that the EIB is funding lots of projects in member states simultaneously. Similarly, the budget of the Commission and similar bodies will generally be set in advance, usually with a formal or informal understanding as to the broad distribution of funds between member states that will follow.
In any case, this project seems to me to be no more extraordinary than the redistributive effects of e.g. Medicaid or Pentagon spending, or the construction of Interstates. The Interstates, in the present US political environment, might indeed seem extraordinary; but the question is then not how one convinces people from state A to spend on state B, but how to convince people to make large long-term investments in the first place.
Keep in mind China has construction more than just from population capacity; it's also a shell game for local districts to get taxes and for "investment" by locals who are told it'll always go up, just like the American market.
And then at the top level, China views it as a "make work" project to keep industry going.
well, doesn't trump want to get the US industry going? i see an opportunity there. invest billions into infrastructure and demand local development of technology used for it.
> won’t even contemplate building something similar to protect NYC
Perhaps not as ambitious as a barrier spanning the entrance to NY Harbor (comparable to Venice's system), NYC did build extensive storm surge barriers along the East River:
Partly why this is an apples-oranges comparison is that Italy's federal government stepped in to make it happen (planning, land acquisition, funding, establishing federally-owned corporate structure). In the US, projects like this are governed just as much by states as they are the federal government, and since the 1970s we've had a strong and entrenched culture of not having the federal government step in to exert its will on a system to produce a public good.
There's a reason why Obamacare was so fraught and ultimately led to a political downfall of the democrats: it spit in the face of private and state interests (from their perspective) to undercut what they'd grown to do in the previous 40 years. This good, but ultimately half-hearted measure, is only a fraction of the kind of political willpower needed to transform the federal state into something that can build infrastructure again.
They do spend on these things. The army corp of engineers is planning a 53 billion dollar project for nyc harbor and sea protection to be built in 2030 or so.
Lots of low-quality construction work though. Anecdotally, I used to live in a 30-story building in one of the special economic zones. My building had horrendously large cracks in the concrete, and even though I knew rationally that it wouldn't come down, it didn't feel safe, especially during typhoons, etc.
The thing is, we used to do this. Walk around London or Florence or Rome and you will see era-adjusted sights that are equally impressive. For that matter, go check out Blenheim Palace. It’s a reasonable question to ask: What happened? But the answer is prosaic. These sights all come from times of _incredible_ inequality. Which you don’t see in these pictures but is vastly more relevant to the day to day lives of most citizens.
Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.
> Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.
You are just describing every western European country.
That’s something that’s developed over the last couple decades. Europe didn’t have vast amounts of homelessness and poverty. My guess is Schengen plus lax immigration policies. That is compare requirements for entering the UAE vs Europe. Europe is less selective.
You’re importing millions which puts pressure on housing and employment where they compete against locals depressing wages. Additionally many/majority from Eastern Europe, Middle East, Central Asia and Africa are semi skilled and unskilled who in turn either can’t land a job or don’t earn enough.
People like ignoring this aspect and even deny it has any effect.
Exactly!
In Europe, people that are leaving in the streets are mostly illegal immigrants, drug addicted or people that refuse helps for mental issues or culture (gipsies).
No, that was the exact point I was making: plenty of places have impressive stuff dating from the days of massive inequality/injustice, we just don’t produce it anymore. Pointing at a 300 year old building isn’t a gotcha, it was literally just the point I was making in the first place.
Really? So why are there food banks in the UK? Why does Google search remove links to personal details of multiple politicians in multiple European countries? For someone poor the top end of NHS dental treatment is a worry - even assuming they can find a dentist willing to take on NHS patients in the first place.
I could go on, but there are plenty of flaws in western Europe
the UK is a special case, not comparable to most of Europe.
I work all over Europe(300+ travel days a year) and the UK is the only country I see young homeless men everywhere on the streets.
I think it’s a misread to attribute large-scale construction mainly to inequality. While inequality funded grand projects historically, today it’s effective planning, strong state capacity, and streamlined execution that make the real difference.
China’s development is impressive because it prioritizes coordination and scale, whereas Europe struggles more with political and organizational fragmentation and lack of initiative.
The strong state capacity collects the resources of large areas and concentrates them into large-scale construction projects in a handful of places. China has a small number of megacities with large, wealthy, modern urban cores and a very large population that lives somewhere else. There are about a hundred cities with more than a million inhabitants but only 47 have urban rail transit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_rail_transit_in_China That's inequality.
Knowing how China designates cities[0], citation needed on the number of cities.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing
> The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria,[14] which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper.
That's fair, but the number of cities with urban rail transit is increasing over time. Whether it's the smaller cities paying for the bigger ones... I don't feel like that's the whole picture, but I don't know enough to dispute that.
A first-order evaluation, just looking at yearly income per person, would say that urban centers make more money per capita and thus contributes more money per capita to tax than non-urban centers.
(Maybe I’m reading too much of a narrative into what you wrote, but–) I don’t think it’s causal like that; it doesn’t have to be. In particular, “wealthy, modern urban cores” tend to be self-sustaining economic force multipliers rather than parasitic resource sinks or vanity projects. Each specific megaproject might be one of the latter, of course. In general, however, I’d be careful about mixing up different public choice failures. How easy it is to: (agree on a fair way to) collect public money, identify and agree on some kind of public benefit, allocate resources to further that interest, execute projects without snags – etc.
> Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.
I think you’re still speaking about Chongqing. China builds these and closes the wage gap.
Tell me one way that your statement doesn’t apply to the US or many other wealthy developed nations.
The GINI coefficient is higher in the USA than it is in China.
China in recent years has reduced inequality while the US has done absolutely nothing to curb discontent, the same discontent that has led to the election of a fascist leader.
> the US has done absolutely nothing to curb discontent, the same discontent that has led to the election of a fascist leader.
I cannot imagine possible definition of "fascist" that would include the US and exclude China. China has far more fascist features than any other major country - personality cult, courts compliant with the government, erasure of minority cultures - and actual genocide.
It seems some people have claimed the word fascist to mean something entirely different to what it actually means in an attempt to shut down conversations when things aren't going their way.
I didn’t say China wasn’t fascist, I only said that the US is moving in that direction rapidly. I am talking about trends not necessarily the state of things at this moment.
> China has far more fascist features than any other major country - personality cult, courts compliant with the government, erasure of minority cultures - and actual genocide.
These are unsubstantiated allegations that come directly from the governments you are loyally defending.
They are definitely substantiated when it comes to USA: Trump has a legendary personality cult and recently released trading cards for it. Trump's FBI just arrested a judge for noncompliance. Trump is hosting genocidal mass-murderer Ben-Gvir in the country right now. This is all just this week! Spare us the vague "look over there, China bad" hand-waving.
It is an insight into human irrationality to see a country where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of crushing absolute poverty, that has built one of the world's best infrastructure from nothing...in the 70s, China was poorer than every country in Africa bar one.
...the problem is that some people are concerned only with how things are done, this is feudal government, this is pre-industrial economic growth, who does things, how they do it, make sure nothing new is every tried because that is dangerous and might lead to the elite losing control. China (and much of East Asia) succeeded because they are concerned only with outcomes, and this is all that people care about anyway. Unfortunately, the West is now controlled by people who see change as dangerous, and nothing is more dangerous than a country leapfrogging them in development because it proves that their leadership is bankrupt and incompetent.
Are you willing to submit to my one party state and be ok with being disappeared if you have an unpopular opinion or being enslaved if you are the wrong minority?
That isn't the powerful criticism that a lot of people think it is. You can keep saying this until you're blue in the face. It doesn't stop China's growth in power and scale. It doesn't impact their citizens at all. It's cheerleading with hot air and ignores the real work that the West needs to put in to effectively compete or counter.
In fact, we should be worried about what the success of such a large non-democratic institution means to developing nations seeking their own model. Or what it means to those in power back at home. Your manner of argument doesn't successfully address the incredible success China has achieved, and if anything, it risks calling the basis of your argument -- the importance of democratic institutions -- into question.
The things the West can do to compete are to work harder on education, become an attractive destination for immigration, foster productive innovation, and focus on key industries and supply chains. Right now the US in particular is doing the opposite, and it's damaging America's standing and ability to compete with China. It comes at a time where it's critical to perform.
By all means, China should be the north star incentive to work harder. During the Cold War we used the threat of the Soviets being better than us to do some of the best engineering and science we've ever done. If our response to China is to call them names and hope that their growth stalls, then I think I can predict a very different and very mediocre outcome for the West in the coming century.
This is our opportunity to rise to the occasion again and be better than we were. Let's not be arrogant and dismissive. Let's not fumble.
Look I get it’s a little early to really draw that line in the US, but we were in a hell of a lot better position to have this argument a couple months ago.
If I told you that a government would exist in Africa that would eliminate poverty across most of the continent in three decades, would you think it strange if people thought this was a terrible thing?
I don’t think anyone who understands geopolitics can agree with this take.
China has been able to (for a time) sustain this kind of rapid industrialization because of globalization, a model of hyper-inflation and by taking advantage of wage inequality (i.e. paying their workers less) in order to dump goods into other countries’ markets. Take away globalization and China starves in the dark, because the part of their population that is largest, most productive and knows how to even feed itself (China is a heavy net importer of food, especially pork) is also very old. And when those people are too old to work, China is going to rely on the rest of the world to sustain its (rapidly declining) population.
There are a lot of other Asian countries in a similar situation, but China is unique in how bleak the future could be for hundreds of millions of people.
A year ago I would have said “who knows when the scale will tip?” With what’s going on lately it seems that it may have already happened. Whether you agree with the economic policy of this administration or not, the ramifications are astounding. The US is positioned to come out of this the best, at the expense of the rest of the world. This is why China is all of a sudden calling the US bullies. They would never admit weakness, but they are suddenly feeling the heat. If the US took it a step further and decided to stop securing the seas in that part of the world, all hell would break loose.
For instance, do you think Japan and China would just “play nice” with no incentive to? I’m not so sure, and China has no access to the ocean without going through Japan.
This argument is Peter Zeihan's thesis too, and I'm not sure it'll be what actually comes to pass.
China still has an enormous population, and if they convert their society from production to domestic consumption and ride the value-add wave, they'll follow the American growth equation. And with more people to bolster that economy, to boot. You can already see this in their dominance of electronics, drones, EVs, and green tech. They're doing advanced, bleeding edge work in all of the industries that matter.
BYD, DJI, Eufy/Anker (vs iRobot), Lenovo, Alibaba, ... China is a formidable powerhouse in advanced products and value-add. These companies absolutely rival the best of what America and the West have to offer. And if your argument is one of demographics, these companies are staffed with young educated workers from a huge and healthy pipeline of STEM grads.
I think of all the predictions about the future of China - from the incredibly bearish ones like Zeihan's "death of China", to the bullish ones that declare this the "Chinese century" - I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I don't see how China doesn't become a larger version of Japan or Germany or the US. Despite some demographic and economic headwinds, they've got an incredible head start.
If America aims to compete and remain in the top, it needs to stop doing things that look like Brexit that lead to degrowth and isolation. China isn't magically going to get weaker and provide free opportunity to the United States. On the contrary, it's fantastic peer-level competition that the US should use as motivation to work harder.
China is an incredible growth and innovation story, and a bar that all countries should hold themselves to. It's no time to slouch. Competition fosters the best innovation anyway.
Hyperinflation? They have been exporting deflation. Wage inequality? It is a productivity inequality, relative to the US. The idea that everyone should just be paid the same wage is quite an odd inference when you start the comment with explaining how everyone else just doesn't understand the things you do.
China moved away from the export-led model of growth about ten years ago (the largest exporter of deflation today is Germany and has been for a number of years).
China does have too many people...there is nothing they can do about that and that will limit their living standards for a long time.
China's future is only bleak if you are unaware of their history. They were poorer than every country in Africa bar one a few decades ago, what they have done is still regarded as impossible even after they did it. It is like winning the lottery and then grousing because there is someone else richer than you (which, btw, most people probably would do).
China does not trade with the US intensively anymore. The US doesn't really make anything that anyone needs, and is a big export market but not at the margin anymore...total exports to the US are 3% of GDP. Their economy has been rebalancing for decades (again, proof that their leaders are just smarter...Trump is flailing around in the darkness with tariffs rather than actually being able to design good policy, China started this ten years ago and almost done already, it would make more sense to target the EU).
China has a long coastline, their primary products mainly come through the Malacca strait...again, it is hard to take someone seriously who starts talking about their expertise in geopolitics but doesn't know which trade routes China actually uses.
This is nonsense, ~zero rich people in third world send their kids to study in Shanghai instead of Boston or immigrate to Beijing instead of NYC to park their capital.
In fact it’s the rich Chinese who continue to move to Vancouver and London and Irvine to escape China and have a better future.
The old-guard rich people don't, that much is true. But the middle classes sure as hell are.
There's the fact that Chinese companies are basically hoovering up all the talent. In Latin America, Huawei alone eats up entire graduating classes of engineers. Pretty much every 'industry' event in any sector is nearly 100% Chinese. University staff are increasingly forming themselves via Chinese companies, and are thus transmitting that to their students. Chinese scholarships are popping up like mushrooms. Again, Huawei alone has provided more of them in the past year than the US Embassy has done in the past three decades.
People still dream about going to the US, sure. But MAGA is doing their damned best to whittle that lead away.
that is provably false. there are many african students in china. and they all must have some amount of wealth from home to afford that, at least compared to the local average which is a lot lower than in the west.
I know many people in third world countries who fear China. I did when living in one (and continue to do so as a citizen of one with still close connections to it).
China is a success for whom? Exploited factory workers, Tibetans and Uyghurs?
For the hundreds of millions of people who have incomes more than $1 per day now. Simple.
China produced one of the greatest economic miracles ever seen in an age when every economic authority said that miracles were impossible. This is still the legacy today where people argue, even after China has thrown up cities housing 20m people in two decades, that isn't real...because it fundamentally overturns basic aspects of the pre-China account of economic growth (which was itself largely based on lies to create support for politicians).
Never forget that economic growth is dangerous to vested interests.
I mean, people go hungry today in plenty of places that fail to build (the U.K. for example) and they went hungry or lived in fear of the powerful in plenty of places before they were able to build at impressive scales.
I’m not sure if it’s what you are thinking of, but I don’t think the massive expansion of cities in the Industrial Revolution was caused by incredible inequality (unless you count inequality between urban and rural areas?).
I guess you could be thinking of ‘monuments’ built by the rich and saying they are due to inequality but I would think the analogue to Chongqing would be the constructing of the ‘megacities’ of the past, which is mostly about building lots of residential, industrial, and office space rather than palaces.
it's a social experiment. "if we don't do it top-down, will the educated and driven try to make us do better or do it themselves?". the answer revealed itself when architecture and design remained procedural but failed to emphasize and to build around the goal of social evolution and identity seeking. instead we got Gentrification, efficiency nobody asked for and wealth wasted on uninspired and demotivating pseudo-game theorists.
it's funny how nobody noticed in time that the side effects of these many experiments destroyed more beauty & opportunities, especially in urban convolution and social convection than they have revealed in data about human nature and civilized networks ... "we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own" is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.
“‘we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own’ is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.”
Meanwhile, in the US, small towns across the country are greying and dying out as wealth and opportunity are increasingly concentrated in urban areas.
vienna is doing it. there is a new neighborhood built from scratch on a green field. literally. a 20 year project for 25.000 residents and 20.000 jobs. just a few decades ago it was all farmland (and an unused airfield).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seestadt_Aspern
The US built huge projects just like this. I know most about chicago, we built a 15,000 person neighborhood in 1942 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes. It became one of the most lawless places in the country. Now it has been torn down. Same story happened 5 different times in this city alone, theyve all been torn down too. Not saying public housing cant work here, but it certainly didnt.
the problem here is building only public housing, and the way the US handles public housing. vienna doesn't build just public housing. seestadt in particular is not public housing. the city does the planning, and private developers compete for specific projects that they fund themselves. and they don't compete on cost but on design that makes for a livable city. so developers don't just get to build what they think makes them the most profit disregarding everything else. the city does contribute to the funding, but that happens with every development in the city anywhere because by city law 2/3rd of all new development must be subsidized with controlled rent. but that is still not public housing like in the US.
the failure of the US project is that it is segregating poor people. vienna doesn't do that. subsidized housing is mixed in. every building has some subsidized apartments among freely financed ones, and also, while you need to qualify by income to get a subsidized apartment, you are allowed to stay even if your income rises.
What's so bad about it other than it's obviously not the cool, centrally located district?
Well connected, long time residents who have access to flats in the inner city always feel superior to the people who move to the city after them, and have to live on the outskirts, that doesn't say much.
3. disregarding the doubled U2 wait times, it takes 40 minutes to get to Karlsplatz, 46 to Stephansplatz, 47 to the main train station, 53 to Westbahnhof, 54 to Landstrasse -those times get much worse if you don‘t live centrally in Seestadt. And those times are AWFUL for Vienna, anything over 30 minutes is awful.
4. The „See“ is actually a joke
5. if you live there, people won‘t want to visit you as it would take them over an hour to get home (unless you take a taxi or have a car)
6. is generally awful without a car -unless you live and work there, this is a big deal as you don‘t usually need a car in Vienna
Yes, it would be better if they built it closer to the inner city, but there's not that much space there anymore. Cities have to be polycentric if they want to scale. I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to live there even if the people from Vienna proper won't be able to come visit.
those travel times are still better than any other city in the world that i have lived in. i am originally from vienna, so i know what you mean, but you have to admit that vienna is privileged in that regard, and the only other option to creating places like this would be to either tear down a bunch of existing buildings and replace them with 20 floor highrises, or a massive demand on existing housing, driving rents up or to generally bar anyone from moving to the city. vienna grew by half a million people in the last 2-3 decades. and that growth is likely to continue. these people need to go somewhere.
as for the concrete desert, what are you asking for? isn't the inner city all asphalt and bricks too? there are parks. but seestadt has green spaces as well. according to the map it has even more than the inner city. but it's all new and it will take some time to feel comfortable and lived in. you have to start somewhere. i mean i get you, nobody wants a concrete desert, nor a concrete dessert for that matter. though the latter might make a good projectile to show your appreciation to the cook.
also how is the "see" a joke? it's water. sure it's not the "alte donau" but from the photos it looks no worse than the donauinsel.
my cousin waited for years to get an apartment in vienna, and they finally got one in the south. from the looks of where they ended up i think seestadt would have been a nicer option.
north east of the danube is the only space where vienna can expand. there is some space to the south of vienna too, but not as much. and probably living in the south would not feel any better.
> What amazes me is China's capacity to do development on a large scale, something that's completely missing in Europe. If we had efficient large-scale construction solved, we could really put a dent in the cost of living crisis, and reverse the overcrowding of the existing urban centers.
Because China has their singular government system (one party dictatorship, whatever you want to call it) they can make really quick decisions. In democratic countries there is a lot of hemming and hawing cause you need everyone or a majority to agree with you, in China or North Korea they just snap their fingers and the project has to start within a few weeks or months.
After seeing what happens when the president tries to unilaterally enact orders without great care for ramifications, it's definitely more appealing to me that we tend to go slowly. I do feel like there must be a middle ground that's yet to be discovered though.
Well the Chinese don't do things unilaterally. The only difference being deliberations being conducted in the Politburo by technocrats vs deliberations being conducted within the White House by untrained yesmen.
In defense of democracy, this issue was less prevalent until the last 30 years.
You don't need everyone to agree on things in a democracy. The issue is lack of leadership and unclear power hierarchy (who matters- house, senate, president, state, or courts).
Democracies with clarity function well. Switzerland leans into state rights, and each canton operates with little federal overhead. The Indian president and senate are weak. The power of civil litigation is limited. So, if you win the states and the house, then you can get a lot done. The Indian house has a full majority and is in the middle of a building boom. Hell, the US built the entire interstate system in a democracy.
IMO, the US's problem is disproportional optics. On paper, the House> president > Senate> courts. But media attention is towards courts > president > senate > house. Roe v Wade was the biggest story of last year, but on paper, the House could've made a bipartisan decision that completely overrode the courts. People are most interested in Presidential elections, but the president has little power. So you end up in a lame-duck Obamacare-style compromise or a Trump-style tariff tantrum. People democratically voted for the president. But turns out, that's not the person who holds power. The house is supposed to be all powerful, but can't pass a single bill. That's how you get wonky policies smuggled through the only unlock unblockable bill. (Budget)
Democracies like any system can fail. At least with democracies, the bad outcome is that nothing gets done. In authoritarian, you get famine, genocide, or coups.
Hot take, but the US should get rid of the senate and limit the power of civic litigation. House introduces the bill, President signs it. Courts step in if the bill is illegal. No filibuster, promote simple majorities.
The more critical things that China is doing well is infrastructure. They have DC transmission networks, solar, and hydro at a scale unheard of in the rest of the world. They're depositing into a savings account right now that will pay them massive dividends for a century or more. They're making the investment that made the US a world superpower that we are no longer willing to make at scale. It's a matter of time until China is the world hegemony. I don't know what that looks like for the world, but it's certainly bad for the US. If the populist politicians currently in charge of the US were actually interested in the public good they would be pouring money into works projects the likes of which haven't been seen in almost a century here in the US.
The Netherlands grew by 1 million people between 2015 and 2025, roughly 6,5% increase in population.
And (almost) everyone has a house.
Except we don't build flats and suburban one-house-fits-all massive construction projects. We mostly do smallscale development times a 1000, in stead of one big one.
Rent increase is not an indicator of the housing market in our country, like it i s in many others.
The Netherlands is 100% rent-controlled.
The 5% increase is because it's tied to inflation, which makes the last few years an anomaly for rent increases.
But yes we do need to build a lot more. I was just pointing out that saying "the West doesn't build anymore" isn't true, we just can't keep up with massive increases in population due to migration.
How come the Netherlands has the most pronounced housing shortage for university students compared to other countries ? Is it because everyone is AirBnb'ing their first and second homes out to tourists?
It's so bad that international students are forced to decline university and graduate school offers. I know because I am in that boat.
Housing in the Netherlands is complex, it's not a free market.
Out of a total of ~8 million homes:
- 4.6 million are owned by the people who live in them.
- 2.3 million are owned by social housing corporations. You have to join a waitlist for these, you can't outbid someone.
And then lastly:
- 1 million houses are "free rentals". But this means they are open to anyone, they are still rent-controlled.
You, together with all other international people, as well as many Dutch people who can't buy and also aren't eligible for social housing are playing musical chairs with only ~13% of the total housing in our country.
I don't think you're understanding the comparison here. The Chongqing metro area in 2015 had a population of 13.4m, today it's 18.2m, a 4.8m difference, or 36% growth.
The Netherlands went from 16.9 to 18.1 today, a 1.2m difference or 7.1% growth. Good by nobody-builds-anything regulatory paralysis standards. Standstill by Chongqing standards.
The cost of housing in the large Chinese megacities is comparable to, if not higher than, that in Western countries. Therefore, they are not constructing housing at a fast enough pace to meet their population’s needs. However, they do build at a rate that is 2-4 times faster than that of Western countries.
> they are not constructing housing at a fast enough pace to meet their population’s needs
It's more accurate to say PRC/CCP understood it's _impossible_ to build enough housing in Tier1 cities where everyone wants to be, the supply/demand curve will never make sense outside of micro/small countries where everyone can fit in a handful of cities. Can't fit 1 billion people in Beijing/Shanghai/Guahzhou/Shenzhen etc, need 30/40/50 cities that are almost as enticing.
What PRC is constructing "fast enough" pace are entirely new cities / developing shitholes into T2/T3 alternatives to shift demand away from T1/T2s. IMO that's the real lesson west needs to learn but can't due to lack of hukou / internal migration controls - spreading out desirable urban areas because talent / productive centres tends to agglomerate ala zipf's law, which Chinese development patterns does not follow. IIRC 10-15 years ago, there were ongoing academic debate about PRC's urban density (or lack of due due to sunlight planning laws), and how PRC could be more competitive if it doubled density in T1 cities, but central gov said no, better build more desirable, low CoL cities (especially inland / poorer regions) where _most_ of population can distribute vs hammer T1 further into unsustainability.
Chinese citizens do not see stocks as a stable investment, so housing becomes the main type of investment. Housing domicile rules (Hukou system) give special rights to homeowners which incentivizes housing purchase instead of renting.
As a result, housing prices are proportionally higher in China than in the US. There is a gold-like intangibility to it.
If China also had NIMBYs alongside this system, their houses would've easily risen to the most expensive in the world.
Chinese housing is a unique situation. Because the government owns everything the chinese stock market kind of sucks. Without equities to invest in the chinese look for alternate investments. Real estate became the main instrument. China has the issue that you'll here leftists in the US claim exists, too many units being kept vacant by investors.
Cost/income is a good ratio. The megacities (Shanghai, Shenzhen etc.) probably have a ratio similar to New York.
Just from top of my head as I left Shanghai 10 years ago, a typical condo in Shanghai could cost over 5 million yuan (urban but definitely not core city), while a salary of 300k pre-tax is considered as a good salary.
On the other side, housing is affordable for locals -- locals usually got very generous compensation from the demolition of their original home.
Europe and America have no industrial strategy to speak of and powerful lobbies dedicated to perpetuating the war on affordable housing.
I doubt this is something that can or will be reversed gradually. The consolidation of oligarchic power has been building up over many decades and only shows signs of acceleration.
In order for the power structures responsible for this to be overturned something pretty cataclysmic will need to happen - losing a large scale war, economic collapse, etc. (e.g. like in post WW2 Japan where America dismantled and disenfranchised the Japanese oligarchy).
We don't need crimes against humanity. We just need more pies from the oligarchs so that we can bring back reasonable housing, some sort of manufacturing and more R&D.
But granted maybe most of them have less than half of a brain once they need to sacrifice the pies.
> No doubt it's a comfortable place to live for many people,
It does not look very comfortable to me. Lots of huge residential tower blocks, one that has a metro line running THROUGH it, a bookshop with shelves that are not reachable.
Because the western world (and rest of the world following western world) has one rule (the only rule): make the super rich richer, everything else is just marketing to accomplish that.
Home prices are completely out of reach for most people in UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia (coming soon to a country near you!). You're overpaying to live like a 1920's postman: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tGPHcteG9dY
Create artificial scarcity (by zoning, monopolies, regulatory capture), buy assets (never have to improve any assets because there is no competition, no functional market of competitors producing better housing), extract wealth forever by maximizing rents and asset prices.
Housing shortages aren't a result of some nefarious plot to make the super rich richer.
It's more complex than that. We need to build more housing, and there are various reasons why that isn't happening. Many of them are well-intentioned and even good (high safety standards dramatically increase the cost of new buildings).
In practice, it turns out not to be true. I am speaking for the US which I know better.
Many environment protections are farcical. (SJ earthworm fiasco). Many building regulations are intentionally difficult with little added safety (2 fire exits). Avenues for litigation and local activism increase delays and costs. Widespread demarcation of cities as historic (despite being run of the mill post war builds) makes redevelopment impossible.
I don't particularly care about intentions. I'm sure Mao thought he was doing the right thing by shooting down sparrows.
The outcomes matter, and the outcomes mean supply crunch, cost inflation and massive weather transfer to home owners (old and rich) from home buyers (middle class and young).
Ah, the classic "good intentions" argument. Picture this: a well-meaning monkey sees a fish struggling in the water. Wanting to help, it pulls the fish out and lays it in the sun to dry. Proud of its good deed, the monkey beams with satisfaction—proof of its altruism! In the monkey world, it's now a hero, basking in praise for its selfless act. Monkey does a TED talk how we can save billions of fish, signs book deals, influencer deals, shills for scams, and so on.
On the 'high' standards: It is all wooden sticks and drywall, completed by 2 minimum wage unskilled labor with a nailgun. None of the homes in US withstand anything, insurance keeps going up. If standards are high, why is insurance going up significantly?
Interest rates have gone up and housing prices haven't changed much. The average monthly mortgage payment for 20% down 30 year fixed mortgages have shot up though. Something makes me feel like it's not just interest rates.
Are you being sarcastic? Housing is a good example of how people fail to understand supply and demand. People usually talk as though supply and demand are fixed quantities rather than curves against price.
CQ: The weather is quite extreme, getting around is pretty hard, the crazy amount of tourist during the Holidays is overwhelming, the wages are lower, less job opportunities. Shanghai is flat, weather is moderate sea climate, food from all over the world, as well as bars, the highest amount of coffeeshops in the world (not really my thing) but most importantly, walkable, whilst CQ is more… hikeable…
The lack of capacity to build in Europe is due to age-old regulations, bureaucracy and very low risk appetite. All this has affected human competence as well, similar to caged animals losing their abilities.
I live in the EU and actually like that citizens are more important than businesses. I wish some construction laws were more strictly regulated, such as those concerning housing development. For example, in Poland, a lack of strict regulation has caused horrible new housing plans with insufficient parking spaces for apartments. There are plenty of similar examples.
In this context, the “business” is… housing and infrastructure for people to live in and use?
And don’t forget the bigger picture. Businesses are jobs. When a country makes it so hostile for business that most can’t even operate there, that’s wages and tax revenue lost.
The above is how Poland ends up with average apartments 8x the average wage.
I don’t even want to get into the issues with prioritizing cars above people. That’s a whole other topic outside of this.
12 years is an eternity in China. I went in 2008-2010 and it was completely unrecognizable compared to 2018. I imagine 2025 is completely different too
Pretty much when I tried to grab a taxi, and it was pretty much every day two times, I could see Taxi were free(no people inside, and now I can't remember if I was the light on or off, but meaning they're just free to take you) no one would stop for about 10 minutes. Sometimes 1 passed and I was able to get it, but usually it was 5-7 cars passing me by.... Someone mentioned people were not accustomed to males with long hair.
The vast majority of Chinese people use Didi or other Apps to call taxis. Those vacant taxis you notice are likely en route to collect their pre-booked passengers. Nowadays, hardly anyone flags down taxis on the roadside anymore - even Chinese citizens find it challenging to get a cab this way. Admittedly, this situation creates difficulties for elderly individuals unfamiliar with smartphones, who mostly depend on family or friends to arrange transportation for them.
> What amazes me is China's capacity to do development on a large scale, something that's completely missing in Europe.
In the US, especially with renewed appetite for "America First" and bringing back good paying jobs for American laborers, there should be a lot more building of infrastructure and housing units around our country... Why can China do this and we can't even when the government has won a mandate from people to empower domestic labor (for everyone who says China can only do this because of wealth inequality)?
Isn't good-paying domestic labor the main part of the problem? Hiring thousands of manual laborers at $5/hour is a lot more economical than at $15/hour plus $5/hr in benefits. And that applies to the steel workers and lumberjacks and fixture manufacturers who all have to be paid more too via material costs.
What amazes me is China's capacity to do development on a large scale, something that's completely missing in Europe. If we had efficient large-scale construction solved, we could really put a dent in the cost of living crisis, and reverse the overcrowding of the existing urban centers.