Comment by kubb
1 day ago
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.
To me, it’s better to compare China with India. Similar populations, yet the effects of different systems of government are extremely obvious.
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?
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Because the only difference between them is their government, not history, not internal differences, or anything else?
They are only similar in size. Do you mean that size is the only factor when doing operating a government ?
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.
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.
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Everything east of the Mississippi could be connected by high-speed rail.
Chicago to NYC is about the same distance as Beijing to Shanghai (1200 km), and that only takes 4.5 hours in China.
The fact that HSR doesn't make sense between LA and NYC is no excuse for not building it in the large parts of the country where it makes sense.
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Most US HSR routes are envisioned planned along similar corridors as the EU ones.
DC - Philly- NYC - Boston
SF - LA - SD
Chicago - Detroit - Toronto
Miami - Orlando - Jacksonville
but why would you build such a long route ? just build train along the coast lines should have plenty benefit.
> 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:
https://www.nyc.gov/site/escr/about/resiliency-and-flood-pro...
https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/about/press-releases/2021/pr-10...
> 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.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20130111042126/http://archiviost...
Wait, doesn't the US Army Corps of Engineers do some of that sort of thing?
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.
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.
Reminds me of this (from 2009): http://blog.pucp.edu.pe/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/109/20...
> even though I knew rationally that it wouldn't come down
How do you know that?
Tofu-dreg construction, or 豆腐渣工程 in Mandarin.
A lot of new-builds literally rusting, falling apart, collapsing, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project
Of course, many builds are fine too.
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.
I mean, my family and i just spent 5 weeks over Christmas in Rome, Paris and London.
I live in Toronto where we have our share of homelessness and those 3 cities put Toronto to shame with the amount of poverty and homelessness we saw.
Europe is beautiful and does many things better than North America and Asia but hunger and poverty are area's where its just as bad if not worse.
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Every Western European country now. Not in the time those sights were built.
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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
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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.
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> 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.
Oh come on.
Lower socio economic Chinese definitely still fear the rich and worry about being homeless and not getting medical treatment.
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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.
I don't understand what this means, or how it fits with the comment it's replying to.
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
I love it, and why doesn't every city do that.
Because of a pervasive meme that only the private sector should be doing this.
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It's an awful place and pretty much all of us Viennese that don't live there make fun of it.
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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.
We think it results in better cities.
Though, it is true we should build even more.
Apparently you have a housing shortage of 400k homes, rents increase 5% YoY, and residents spend more than 20% of their income on housing.
Your cities are great though, I love the Netherlands.
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.
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 Netherlands has the biggest housing crisis of continental Europe, too.
> And (almost) everyone has a house.
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.
https://nltimes.nl/2025/04/22/housing-shortage-netherlands-r...
https://www.goinconnect.com/success-stories/the-student-hous...
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.
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 housing demand is a unique beast.
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.
The prices depend on the city, apartments in Chongqing cost around $1,000 USD per m², about 1/5th of the prices in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
What does ‘comparable’ mean? Is it about ratios between incomes and costs? Or cost of the same apartment in two places? Or something else?
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.
Median monthly cost in terms of median take home pay would be the sensible comparison.
This would exclude ex-pats.
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.
> 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.
All those in a curated set of pictures!
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?
The main reason for high prices is not shortages, its low interest rates.
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I would not consider CQ comfortable. Shanghai is 1000x more comfortable.
What criteria do you consider when you think about comfort in this sense?
The (always-credulous) Guardian seems to go based on photogenic shopping centers/bars and raw square footage:
“A flat in Chongqing costs a seventh of what it would cost in Beijing or Shanghai and is twice as big.”
Presumably your criteria might be more subtle?
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…
Chongqing has better food.
> 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 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.
I was there about 12 years ago, and in all honesty, I wasn't impressed.
The air pollution was absolutely horrific, for whole I was there I wasn't able to see the sun at all due to air or lack of it.
"Green" trees were just... grey, covered with all the dust.
And good luck if you want to grab a taxi and you have long hair :)
The food was great, though.
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
Agree, pretty much like everywhere, however what I can see from the pictures the air pollution is still there and it looks horrific.
> And good luck if you want to grab a taxi and you have long hair
Please explain
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.
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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).
A new cold war might help. If that happens any oligarchy with half a brain would have to give back some pies to the ordinary people.
For second place, maybe. China is largely out of our grasp without our committing pretty extreme crimes against humanity.
Granted, we were fine with that with the first cold war, maybe we'll find the appetite again.
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1) you don't even know what the cause of cost of living is 2) you have no idea what you are talking about
> 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)?
What is the administration's infrastructure plan other than to fire a large portion of people who support it at the federal level?
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.
Because of the national mandate that Big Government Is Bad that happened 40 years ago, as best I can piece together.