The Golden Generation: Why China’s super-rich send their children abroad

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/questiona...

As the article makes clear, real estate is increasingly viewed as an asset that can simply be purchased and held on to diversify a risky portfolio. Foreign property owners add little to no value (in a true, human, social sense) to the greater society. They do contribute tax revenue, but at the expense of making real estate unattainable for others by driving up prices.

Real estate used to be the center of a business owner's livelihood or a family's multi-decade investment in an area with family, good schools, a good community, etc.

While increasing supply would reduce price, foreign investors would simply purchase more. Demand for (perceived) stable assets to offset market volatility is at an all time high, especially in China where many are trying to export wealth.

When the market crashes, you'll have an oversupply of property that was built for people who did not actually inhabit the area.

There is some component of demand that is buying these single family houses just for the extra space for their family. Rezoning detached houses to slightly more dense row houses will help increase supply for this group. The city is already doing this, but should certainly do more. The city can't do anything about people buying detached houses for investment and prestige reasons.

Vancouver is not SF. It has been building condo towers non stop since the 90s. Rent is not extremely unaffordable and condo valuations have been largely flat in comparison to single family houses.

The biggest problem with housing is that it's just too easy to influence people to create an artificial scarcity when there is now, and in the few places there is no land laws will help as developers like to keep the supply short in order to increase it's value.

Even a small shortage (fake or real) can increase the value of properties by 100's of percent this means that building more isn't lucrative to neither developers nor investors, if you just bought a property as an investment you sure as hell do not want the developer going on and building 10 new ones as it will tank the price of your property. This means that even on the off chance that a developer might find formula that will allow them to build more the investors wont buy in and without that they can't build as no sane developer builds even a parking lot out of pocket these days.

On the other hand government housing isn't good either in most places government housing turns into ghettos faster than you can open a 7/11 and in the few countries it didn't like say Sweden it created the worse housing shortage anyone can imagine while creating a black market which corrupted the entire system.

If anything oddly enough China is taking the best approach just build entire cities, sure some of them rest as ghost cities for some years but unlike what the media reports in the west they tend to be filled almost instantly once the planets align.

You're saying that one ideological change won't enable that for me (and every one of the other 100 million like me)?

Even if these lazy Chinese kids' rich parents are subsidizing the hard-working Americans' education? (You can bet a Chinese billionaire's paying the full tuition without financial aid.)

2. I used to be uhh a foreign national in the U.S (as I still am), and assumed it was a known fact that Chinese nationals often buy their way through college. Somewhat related: Northeastern and their special- Chinese-student program that gives 4-year US degrees with 0 knowledge of English.

3. It is not necessarily something to complain about, as long as it doesn't COMPLETE dilute the value of the degrees concerned. AFAIK, Chinese students (NOT Chinese American, mind) are the only students who will often pay 100% of the feels, with no request for scholarships. So to look at it the other way, you're subsidizing smarter students by taking in slightly less smart students (tbh, most Chinese students are extremely competitive, so we shouldn't be generalizing.)

Think of each university in the US has having its own culture and way of doing things. Many universities certainly use best practices, but there are no federal regulations on such things as test identification.

Note that not every American has state-issued photo ID, especially among the poor.

Basically, the stereotype that all <insert group> look alike does happen, NOT because they do look alike, but because to someone who does not know members of that group, their facial recognition system (mental schema) are not developed enough to tell people apart.

Think of it like if you trained a neural network to do facial identification by only giving it white people. Compared to a near identical network where the only difference was that it was trained on a cross section of all of earth's people, which would you expect to do a better job?

Strangely enough, the Chemistry Department was better at recognizing me than my own Comp Sci Department. Perhaps it was because my major stood out on the class ranking printouts. In one course, the profs gave out a new CRC Manual as a prize to the top scorer in the class, and they were lucky Sujata Bhatia beat me, because it might have been embarrassing to the department otherwise. Maybe lucky isn't the right word--the lady had mad skills with a molecule.

I suppose it would have been theoretically possible for me to have been impersonating another student the entire time I was at university, but so long as I answered to the same name during lectures and labs as I wrote on the test, and that name was paid up on tuition according to the bursar, that was pretty much all the verification that was needed.

Edit: Nevermind, your post seems to have completely changed. I suppose you're just afraid this will translate into Xenophobia against [presumably] people like you.

Where can I read about this? Of course if it's true, I could find a zillion dumb stories about it from various locations, but maybe you know a good, insightful, deep writup somewhere?

I'd never heard of this, so I am really fascinated.

EDIT: From a co-worker, the chairman of China is an old-school traditionalist Maoist who thinks all this Capitalism and Democracy BS has gone too far, and it's time to purge it all and have another cultural revolution. Still no good hard evidence links.

Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days