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Comment by zoowar | Hacker News Reader

Ghost cities also keep construction workers employed.

Why is this downvoted? It is a valid point. Especially in 2008/09 they were rebuilding every second road in the Chinese city I life in, even though the roads where perfectly fine and had just been finished a few years earlier. Same for apartment buildings. They can not just stop building them, because there are literally tens of millions of people getting their income from constructing those buildings.

>They can not just stop building them, because there are literally tens of millions of people getting their income from constructing those buildings.

Don't you see why this is obviously disastrous? There are so many analogies that can be drawn -- that I'm not even going to try. If you don't see why this is obviously ridiculous then read some stuff about the invisible hand of the market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand). It is only a valid point from the narrow perspective of the workers involved and the employers of those workers selling their services.

Of course I "see" this. But I also see short to medium term considerations by the CN gov't of political stability in the country. Especially at a time of imminent power transition to the next political generation.

Its called "political reality".

But yeah, I read about the theory you linked to, about 10 years ago, when I studied it.

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