31–40 of 262 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotta say, housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at. Here in Australia, it has become an investment vehicle; a huge amount of housing stock is empty while a third of the population are living in very poor accommodation.
Non-free market housing isn't that great either though, like in Berlin.
Disagree on calling Suzhou Industrial Park a failure. I grew up there and can say that while it may not have attracted the desired profit levels it certainly did have miraculous effect on the people of Suzhou. Wages have sky rocketed (as has property price). It may not have been profitable within 5 years, more than 400 fortune 500 companies had their factories located there in 2014. Suzhou went from a city with two b…
Isn't that what Deng Xiaoping meant when he said that "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."
Disagree on calling Suzhou Industrial Park a failure. I grew up there and can say that while it may not have attracted the desired profit levels it certainly did have miraculous effect on the people of Suzhou. Wages have sky rocketed (as has property price). It may not have been profitable within 5 years, more than 400 fortune 500 companies had their factories located there in 2014. Suzhou went from a city with two b…
Blame that Fukuyama- who by the way already backpedaled in the face of real history lol.
Disagree on calling Suzhou Industrial Park a failure. I grew up there and can say that while it may not have attracted the desired profit levels it certainly did have miraculous effect on the people of Suzhou. Wages have sky rocketed (as has property price). It may not have been profitable within 5 years, more than 400 fortune 500 companies had their factories located there in 2014. Suzhou went from a city with two b…
> The SIP ran into trouble when local officials began building Suzhou New District (SND) industrial park to compete with it. As the Suzhou city government had only a minority 35 percent stake in the SIP, while they had a major stake in SND, the city government largely ignored SIP and concentrated on promoting the SND instead.
> After incurring losses of some US$90 million over 5 years, the Singapore consortium lowered its stake to 35 percent, raising the Chinese consortium's stake to 65 percent from 35 percent and reducing the Singaporean share from a planned 70 km2 to just 8 km2. The Chinese side appointed Wang Jinhua, vice-mayor of Suzhou and the former manager of the New District, as the new chief executive.
> In 2001, one year after Singapore lowered its stake, the park made its first profit of $3.8 million.
Ask some of the million poorly paid foreign workers what they think of the success of Singapore - I'm sure the story won't be quite as glowing.
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That's right, we tend to label every successful economy "capitalism", but actually if you look at Singapore there's some things that are not so obviously free market. Housing, for instance.
Gotta say, housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at. Here in Australia, it has become an investment vehicle; a huge amount of housing stock is empty while a third of the population are living in very poor accommodation.
Disagree on calling Suzhou Industrial Park a failure. I grew up there and can say that while it may not have attracted the desired profit levels it certainly did have miraculous effect on the people of Suzhou. Wages have sky rocketed (as has property price). It may not have been profitable within 5 years, more than 400 fortune 500 companies had their factories located there in 2014. Suzhou went from a city with two b…
According to some Westerners there is only one road that leads to prosperity. Only Western culture and Western philosophy matters. Blame that Fukuyama- who by the way already backpedaled in the face of real history lol.
"This character was only mentioned in dialogue. Lee Kuan shares naming elements with Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Singapore in the 1960s. Lee established a hybrid form of governance with democratic and authoritarian elements."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotta say, housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at. Here in Australia, it has become an investment vehicle; a huge amount of housing stock is empty while a third of the population are living in very poor accommodation.
> Here in Australia... House prices in Australia are driven by two forces - immigration and monetary policy (ie, interest rates). Neither of those drivers are linked to a free market. The equilibrium in both is set by government decree (immigration numbers) and interest rates are set by the RBA (effectively part of the government bureaucracy) to a first approximation. The government doesn't have an explicit policy of…