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Comment by mrjin | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that's going to help. The decades of property bubble has changed the mindset of the people. Just look at Japan, it's property bubble burst was decades ago, but till now, are there any signs of turnaround? Young people have enough trouble just to get a shelter and feed themselves, and now you want them to have kids which add more pressure onto what they are already struggling to coup with. How likely is that?

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But Japan has a population crumble, a long LONG tradition of home price devaluation (earthquakes destroy everything, why build super high quality stuff and why maintain, after 10 years your protection is more fragile or obsolete) and prices are extremely low.

In China, they had a speculative bubble sure, but what s gonna kill the market is that in 20 years a lot less young people will exist to even buy the houses, like in Japan.

People live incomparably harder lives in Nigeria than in Japan, and yet they have plenty of children. It's about values, not circumstances.

Well yeah, once you go down in standards of living low enough, the math flips over in favor of having children again. Because at that point, the mortality rate of children is high enough, you need extras just in case. And then someone’s gotta work your fields just to survive, after all. So the more the better just from the financial and survival standpoint alone.

To greatly simplify, it basically makes it so that it makes sense to have children on the far ends of wealth and poverty, and much less sense to do so in the middle.

Yeah, it's gonna be very hard to get the genie to go back into the bottle, people won't forget that real estate is very powerful for financial speculation, and that even if the bubble bursts again and again you have plenty of years with amazing returns.

At least the same hasn't happened with food and drinkable water yet.

The problem gets deeper: This may sound insane, but I would argue that the productivity is way too high. There is too much stuff, which is too cheap, which makes it too hard to make money by actually producing anything. This it turn splits the economy into two groups: One that doesn't have money, live scrapping the bottom, and typically in debt. The other that does have money, with no good opportunities to invest, which causes bubbles.

Ye the competition is too high in the base and the profit taken by middle men.

However, I think covid changed that, where producers collectivly realized that if they just raise prices the middle men need to pay up.

Being stuck in a sector that operates "efficiently" sucks. You want guilds, like lawyers and doctors, or inefficiency, like the financial sector.

No, not like that:

Evergrande is in the first group here, fruitlessly producing something of no real value, as there is too much of it.

The second group are those who invested in Evergrande itself, or the housing it built.

It sucks for everyone.

It sucks for Evergrande, as sooner or later it had to go bankrupt.

It sucks for those who invested in the housing, as it's clear that if they actually tried to sell or rent out the housing they would end up with some paltry sum.

It sucks for those who invested in Evergrande, as they're going to lose money.

It suck ls for those who can't afford a place to live because of the inflated prices.

I think there are really no winners here. No middlemen filling their pockets. It was a loss for everyone.

> I think there are really no winners here

As with any bubble, the winners are the people who cashed out at the right time

> It suck ls for those who can't afford a place to live because of the inflated prices.

Wouldn't a bubble pop help these people?

Wouldn't the ruling class on the opposite end of the leverage chain have benefited greatly with stacks of cash? The fun party is over now, but at least profit was successfully extracted from others. The extreme losers being people on the other side of the chain, paying mortgages on property that will never be built.

The wrong kind of productivity is too high. Too much consumer crap, much of it disposable. Not enough no-compromise blue sky R&D and research into physics fundamentals.

Don't worry, the unfortunate side of the "split" could just start a side-hustle! Maybe another podcast, or OnlyFans account. Everyone has a story to sell, and if not, just make it up! "Content creation" to create need for a marketing-made spontaneously mass-produced something, anything, as parasitic load on dopaminergic parasocial relationships. See? Growth finds a way! Super healthy, totally not an indicator of things getting catastrophically unbalanced.

Already, at capacity attention, over capacity exploitation. Infrastructure debts, planetary debts #YOLO

I wonder, when we're finally getting AI enhanced productivity end to end, will we realize how deep we dug ourselves in?

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