Tag: economics

China Cities

Sinocity, a fictitious city in an imaginary Chinese province, reflects more reality of mid-sized Chinese cities than many will admit. The Sinocities Awards seeks to explore awards ways of dealing with this status quo of the near future.

2010-09-02: 1b city by 2040

Going to 2400 km/h in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe would enable 90% of China’s population to be 1 hour apart by low pressure maglev.

2015-04-02: City Hypergrowth. While not quite the fastest growing at 200k people / year vs Karachi at nearly 1m / year, these pictures of rapid transformation are still interesting.

Tim Franco captures the massive urbanization of Chongqing, which has been described as “the biggest city you’ve never heard of” and “China’s Detroit.”

2017-04-02: Megacity integration

China is breaking the administrative barriers between Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. This will enable coordinated development. Transportation, education, medical, economic, ecological services are moving towards integration in the cities which make up the 130M Jing-jin-ji megacity area.


2017-07-13: China Megacities

Chinese megacities are associated with the greatest migration in human history, namely the movement of several 100M people from the countryside into urban areas. This has created over 100 cities with a population of more than 1M. And while Westerners tend to see only the harmful effects of that transformation, it’s gone fairly smoothly. Wages and living standards have risen to create the biggest rapid boost in prosperity the world has seen, ever. Surely it’s worth taking a closer look at that.

If you spend a few days in these places, they will stand out as quite distinct. To suggest otherwise is actually to repeat a common Western imperialist meme about the Chinese, namely that they “are all the same” in some underlying manner. Observing and understanding diversity is a skill, and the Chinese megacities are one of the best places for cultivating this capacity.

2018-07-03: Faster commutes are key for integration

It seems clear that China will continue to leverage technology to enable faster commuting within city regions.

  • more high-speed rail lines
  • robotic buses
  • robotic cars and ridesharing with high-speed roads and tunnels
  • ultra-fast elevators to commute from skyscraper to skyscraper and to speed the last 300 meters.

China will do what takes to get the potential 50% GDP boost from truly efficient 1-hour connections.

2018-09-04: China Urbanism

China is creating 19 supercity clusters by strengthening the links between existing urban centers. The supercities will have 800m people and more than 80% of the country’s GDP in 2030. 287m people have moved from low-income agriculture to higher-income city industries, the largest population transfer in history. Another 40m people will migrate to cities by 2020 and the productivity gap will have more than halved since 2000.

Buying Jobs

Let’s say that the world is so wealthy that most people don’t need to work. Still they might be bored. They might want to work. What kinds of jobs could they buy? Under one view, the resulting jobs would always feel phony. The customers/laborers would never fear being fired. They would never have to try very hard, or could never feel that the enterprise really mattered. You might, for instance, buy a job as a blogger.

considering that technological change will get us there pretty quickly, the comments are pretty inane

Expand the AMT!

The AMT is a flat tax, it’s broad-based, it doesn’t allow for deduction of state and local taxes (which only increases the incentive of states and localities to raise taxes) and it’s simple. The AMT should be reformed but overall it’s a much better tax than the current income tax.

Contagious Free trade

The Japanese are concerned about the US-South Korea free trade agreement, and might seek their own trade deal with the United States. The Japanese are afraid of being “left out in the cold.” I’ve also read speculation that a South Korean trade agreement might make Congress look more favorably upon free trade agreements with Latin America. So why might one free trade agreement lead to others?

hopefully, they are. would provide a good counterweight to all the mercantilist and protectionist clowns

Subprime

it might be that the default risk is only $300b. by comparison, the tech crash was $9t.
2007-12-05: this is hilariously funny

2008-03-16:

a newsteam ventures to one of LA’s new shantytowns made up of people who’ve lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs on abandoned land. It’s the contemporary Hooverville, and, as the Subliterate Cinephile notes, I wonder why I found out about this from the BBC and not US media.

The Penny Gap

The truth is, scaling from $5-$50M is not the toughest part of a new venture – it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. I can’t think of a single premium service that has achieved truly viral distribution. Can you?

why paid services are mostly dead, at least in consumer markets