2,715 karma · joined January 14, 2013
Also the number you quoted lumped housing together with other costs. China has very high home ownership and home prices are very elevated. Much public services and transport infrastructure builds are funded through government land sales and therefore through home sales. That could also skew the data.
Another problem with the national median data is the great variations in development levels and therefore cost of livings across geographic regions.
It's not easy to change the spending habits of the older adults. Consumption is also work. It's about increasing utility, not just spending. Consider the time after the Fukushima when misinformed consumers hoarded salt. It would be hard to argue that consumption increased utility. You want consumers to be informed, you want spending to discriminate against incompetent manufacturers and bad services. If older adults get more utility from watching their bank accounts grow than doing the work to consume without regrets, just shoveling more money indiscriminately isn't going to stimulate consumption much.
Basically when a rock solidifies from lava or a lifeform dies they cease to exchange materials with their environment and the concentration of unstable isotopes will decay and deviate from that of the environment. The difference can be used to date how long the exchange has stopped.