China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

gwynedd1:

Here's a serious question for you. (anybody that is conversant with the needle gun has me at go) Throughout history, war has been the endgame reset. Among its advantages in addressing a grave. structural crisis:

Re-legitimizing control at the top

Mandates drastic cutting back on standard of living due to the war effort

Increases profits, sharply in war-related sectors

Rationalizes the economy in ways difficult in peacetime

Adds new technology

My question is, is this still possible. Is a major war reset an option? Decades of institutionalized military Keynesianism, nuclear warfare, a global monopoly in many fundamental industries, a system-wide stagnation. If not, does that increase the deepening malaise?

[gwynedd1]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

gwynedd1:

Here's a serious question for you. (anybody that is conversant with the needle gun has me at go) Throughout history, war has been the endgame reset. Among its advantages in addressing a grave. structural crisis:

That's more like it. I am thinking war as a major category of regime change does that. I think plaques and pestilences have this "advantage" as well hence the Statute of Laboures 1351. Gives a better appreciation to those who sweep the carpets .

Re-legitimizing control at the top

Mandates drastic cutting back on standard of living due to the war effort

Increases profits, sharply in war-related sectors

Rationalizes the economy in ways difficult in peacetime

Adds new technology

My question is, is this still possible. Is a major war reset an option? Decades of institutionalized military Keynesianism, nuclear warfare, a global monopoly in many fundamental industries, a system-wide stagnation. If not, does that increase the deepening malaise?

Perhaps someone thinks cold war is an option.

"As a certain kind of confidence forms the glory and stability of

monarchies, republics, on the contrary, must have something to

apprehend.[8] A fear of the Persians supported the laws of Greece.

Carthage and Rome were alarmed, and strengthened by each other. Strange,

that the greater security those states enjoyed, the more, like stagnated

waters, they were subject to corruption!"

Montesquieu


It is a problem in a society to define good and evil. What is it really? One can especially see this with the almost comical prevailing economic arguments as if a good economy
is universally agreed upon. A good economy is not so easily defined given the kinds of cross currents in a peace time economy. The light bulb that never need be changed isn't good for everyone.

However when it comes to war ,a single point of focus makes this much easier to define. The civilization lines up itself much more unequivocally. Removing gum from a shoe is aid to the war effort.


But that is the point of my remark. Just how much is civil society itself much of a goal? I have seen similar conspiratorial theories( not speaking in the pejorative) that Thorium reactors make
for poor breeder reactors for bomb making so we went with the more spooky stuff that serves more than one purpose.
So I wonder, are we just making due with the leftovers of the military in civil society, or is it even more than that, civil society made to be quickly bent into a sword?



Speaking of the rat catcher....Even those can be considered contemporary with the 1870s

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

The Montesquieu quote reminds me of my initiation - breaking my cherry, so to speak - of boom times in construction. I naively thought bounty would make everyone happier, not unleash the beast. Over 20+ years I learned that the sweet spot for contracting was the early uptick following a recession. The no-nothings had been purged and the vets could graze in some peace. Yes, be it our human nature . . . . in all things.

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

“…the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror”

T.S.Eliot, The Dry Salvages

These are sorrowful – and dangerous – times. We’re powerless facing the perennial Middle Eastern agonies or the build up towards Cold War 2.0; the myriad ramifications of the Pentagon’s Long War or the pauperization of the Western world’s middle classes. The feeling of a global civil war is unmistakable. At least, in a few obscure corners of NATOstan, some of the best and the brightest, in silence, are thinking.

In a short volume – Stasis. La Guerra Civile come Paradigma Politico – based on two seminaries at Princeton and available in Italian and French but not yet in English, master philosopher Giorgio Agamben identifies civil war as the West’s fundamental sign of politicization. The key question is whether this proposition has been altered by our civilizational plunge into the dimension of global civil war.

Stasis is the civil war that provoked trouble inside the ancient Greek polis. Hannah Arendt was already conceptualizing global civil war in 1963. Agamben argues that in global historical terms, civil war now is represented by terrorism.

So if Foucault was right when he qualified modern politics as “biopolitics,” says Agamben, “terrorism is the form taken by civil war when life becomes a political game.”

It’s all about the balance between oikos (the family) and polis (the city) as the Greeks – always them – identified it. So, when the polis presents itself under the reassuring face of an oikos, as in the so comforting image of the “house of Europe” sold by Brussels, or in “the world as the absolute space of global economic management,” Agamben argues, “the stasis, which cannot be placed between oikos and polis, becomes the paradigm of every conflict and assumes the figure of terror.”

Thus terrorism equals global civil war. The next step, which Agamben does not take – after all it’s a short essay – would be to qualify the myriad declinations of terrorism; not only of the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh kind, but also state terrorism, as in the indiscriminate killing of civilians worldwide by our usual imperial and sub-imperial suspects.

Barbarism begins at home

As terrorism is a form of barbarism, another short essay – L’Europe a Deux Visages – by master sociologist Edgar Morin, goes a step further as he takes us on a brief but very ambitious anthropology of human barbarism.

Morin argues that the ideas of Homo sapiens, Homo faber and Homo economicus are insufficient. After all, Homo sapiens can become Homo demens (see the endless political archive of delirium and dementia, from Nero to Dick Cheney). Homo faber may also produce an endless collection of myths. And Homo economicus may also turn into Homo ludens, a joyful player (German Finance Minister Schauble excluded.)

Human barbarity belongs of course to Homo demens; an avid producer of delirium (Daesh’s Caliph Ibrahim), hatred (Saudis against Shi’ites), contempt (the wealthy towards the downtrodden) and – the Greeks, once again – hubris (the trials and tribulations of the Empire of Chaos). Not to mention, as Morin reminds us, that technology introduces its own form of barbarism; the barbarism of pure, glacial calculation.

Morin shows us that Europe may not have had the monopoly of barbarism, but has certainly manifested all forms of barbarism recorded in history in a much more durable, massive and innovative form. And he ties all this innovation to the formation of the modern European nation, in Spain, France, Portugal, England.

The most damning case is Spain. In Islamic areas – Al Andalus – there was plenty of tolerance towards Christians and Jews, and in the Christian zone, tolerance towards Muslims and Jews, up to 1492.

So what happened in 1492? “Not only the discovery of America and the start of the conquest of the New World. It was also the year of the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim bastion in Spain, and slightly later, of the decree imposing to Jews and Muslims to choose between conversion or expulsion. This European invention, the nation, was built from the start over a foundation of religious purification.”

Well, at least the West was also blessed by the Renaissance – which gestated European humanism. Morin identifies two divergent explanations for the essence of humanism. One extols the Judeo-Christian tradition. The other is about Ancient Greece – because it’s in Greek thought that human spirit and rationality affirm their autonomy. The best case can be made that humanism developed a Greek message, revitalized in Renaissance Italy. A few minutes contemplating Botticelli’s Spring at the Uffizzi may be enough to clinch the case.

Auschwitz =Hiroshima

Morin also reminds us that, “in the democratic city of Athens, goddess Athena does not govern, she protects.” The true meaning of democracy is that “responsible citizens have the government of the city in their hands.” Hard to fit Merkel, Cameron, Hollande or the new House of Saud capo into this description.

In parallel, as European barbarism evolved, Morin also reminds us that it has always treated The Other – think the Global South – as barbarian, instead of celebrating a difference and seeing the opportunity of mutual enrichment through knowledge and human relations.

There are exceptions, of course. So in our current pitiful condition the least we could do is to heed the lessons of Spinoza – for whom reason was sovereign; not “a cold, glacial reason, but a profoundly compassionate reason.” Spinoza was a spirit as independent as Montaigne – another one of our inspiring models.

Morin is implacable; if Auschwitz was supreme barbarism, so was Hiroshima. He qualifies Brussels, correctly, as an “European techno-bureaucracy”; insists that Turkey is “a European power”, especially after the fall of Byzantium; and fondly remarks that “Russian culture brought sensibility and a human depth to European culture,” as “Russia is also European.” Try telling purveyors of Cold War 2.0 about it.

So all is not lost, even though we must admit barbarism is also us. Morin tells us that to think seriously about barbarism is to contribute to regenerate humanism. So even under siege, and under the aegis of a global civil war, we shall resist, with our hearts and minds. No pasarán.

Escobar

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

Escobar waxes philosophically, mentioning some interesting sources, but is the real conundrum the increasingly ill-fitting nation state and capital globalism.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

gwynedd1:

Here's a serious question for you. (anybody that is conversant with the needle gun has me at go) Throughout history, war has been the endgame reset. Among its advantages in addressing a grave. structural crisis:

Re-legitimizing control at the top

Mandates drastic cutting back on standard of living due to the war effort

Increases profits, sharply in war-related sectors

Rationalizes the economy in ways difficult in peacetime

Adds new technology

My question is, is this still possible. Is a major war reset an option? Decades of institutionalized military Keynesianism, nuclear warfare, a global monopoly in many fundamental industries, a system-wide stagnation. If not, does that increase the deepening malaise?

I've posited here before a war scenario that involves a genuine high risk of conflict between Pakistan/India that sucks in China while leaving the US relatively immune.

Whether one agrees with my overall scenario, what cannot be denied is the far higher risk of conflict(including nuclear) between Pakistan/India as compared to US/Soviet Union war(including nuclear) risk.

That's due to two factors:

1)Geographic proximity(military commanders battlefield appreciation great emphasis on "time and space", of which there is close to none with the application of nuclear weapons to the Pak/India battlespace).

2)Less mature control measures(even with US support to Pakistan, Pak/India nuclear warhead command/control/launch authority use TTPs would be less mature than tested(and even then occasionally failed) US/USSR nuclear weapons TTPs.

When(not if) an inevitable PAK/India conflict sparks, the default setting of aggressive US pressure to de-escalate may no longer exist, or choose to be used(act of omission, rather than commission, on the part of the US).

This could lead to a higher risk of nuclear weapons employment(on the part of Pakistan more likely) also in part due to India's recently enabled "Cold Start" strategy of very rapid conventional force mobilization, which would further compress the "time and space" pressure on commanders/political leaders.

Could the US potentially use a PAK/India crisis, shaping it via stalling and omission of typical response, to create a global crisis?

Pakistan and India do not possess the capability to strike the US via conventional nuclear delivery systems.

And China would be FAR more likely to be sucked into an escalating PAK/India crisis due to India probably having a fair chunk of it's nuclear deterrent aimed not just at Pakistan, but also China.

The US could potentially sit back and claim "not our problem or interest, but we will not tolerate conflict expanding beyond the boundaries of PAK/India(and China as Pakistan's sponsor).

Likely scenario? Of course not.

And don't forget Mike Tyson's quote of "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

But it is a region at high risk of future conflict due to the aforementioned reasons, where the two main and historical opponents/combatants, are nuclear armed.

And US political response in the future could quite possibly differ dramatically than in the past.

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

My understanding of Pakistan, albeit limited, is a much smaller nation compared to India, with a subsequent military necessity of having a nuclear deterrent, and an absolute need to have their back covered with a friendly Afghanistan. Could there be a regional nuclear exchange? It would seem, once again on limited knowledge, to be in the hands of India and how aggressive they chose to be over Kashmir.

This could add legitimacy to US use of "limited" nuclear weapons post Pakistan/India exchange, elsewhere

[gwynedd1]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

Escobar waxes philosophically, mentioning some interesting sources, but is the real conundrum the increasingly ill-fitting nation state and capital globalism.

The advance of technology leaves us in a perpetual state of adolescence. The brain of an infant , unformed as it is still exceeds its own power. An adolescent on the other hand has an accumulation of powers that it hardly has the mind to properly employ.

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

an interesting take on kicking the can down the road

"there is a tendency to misrepresent historical time, in the direction of both the past and the future, in the interest of eternalizing the present. The tendentious misreading of the past arises from the ideological imperative to misrepresent the present as the necessary structural framework of all possible change. For precisely because the established present must be timelessly projected into the future, the past must also be fictionalized - in the form of a projection backwards - as the domain of the system's eternal presence in another form, so as to remove the actual historical determinations and the time bound limitations of the present." Meszaros

from Hegel's 1+1+1+1 will suddenly = a new quality, to 1+1+1+1 = 1 . . . forever.

[lektrode]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

an interesting take on kicking the can down the road

"there is a tendency to misrepresent historical time,....
...

or howzabout watching a
57-Story Building Go Up in 19 Days

and thanks to touchring for this post, has been absolutely fascinating to actually see whats happened over there in only 1-2 generations...

can you say 'productivity' ?

they certainly can.

meanwhile... over here?

endless braying over 'minority rights' ?
at the expense/subjugation of the VAST MAJORITY of The Rest Of US
ALL for the 'benefit of' the political class (and their primary benefactors, whom they owe their souls to)
to satisfy the whim du jour of steadily smaller slices of the electorate, for THEIR margin of 'victory'

aint it sumthin...

[Southernguy]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

Yes, Virginia, it's a bubble....

[don]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

and thanks to touchring for this post, has been absolutely fascinating to actually see whats happened over there in only 1-2 generations...

can you say 'productivity' ?

they certainly can.

+1

meanwhile... over here?

endless braying over 'minority rights' ?
at the expense/subjugation of the VAST MAJORITY of The Rest Of US

Slice & dice, pal, the ole divide and conquer . . . .

[touchring]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

or howzabout watching a
57-Story Building Go Up in 19 Days

and thanks to touchring for this post, has been absolutely fascinating to actually see whats happened over there in only 1-2 generations...

can you say 'productivity' ?

they certainly can.

Thanks for putting up the video.

There's a huge bubble, but there had also been a huge boost in productivity, especially in building and construction and transportation.

[GRG55]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

Thanks for putting up the video.

There's a huge bubble, but there had also been a huge boost in productivity, especially in building and construction and transportation.

So how does China keep a Billion people employed in the face of this trend?

[touchring]

Re: China cities at the peak of the largest real estate bubble in history

So how does China keep a Billion people employed in the face of this trend?

I see hiring notices all over the place when I was in West China. West China, at least, doesn't appear to have an unemployment problem. In fact, small businesses are having problems finding people.

I do not think there is unemployment benefits in China, so people have to work, become a janitor, sell fruit on the street, or whatever it takes to pay rent and the bills. I have also heard stories about pensioners working to supplement their monthly pension.

China is a society where both men and women work and if pensioners also start working, this is a clue that the labor market is extremely tight. The next step will be to relax immigration and start importing labor, which I can foresee happen within 5 years.

Businesses use a lot of automation, in some of the high speed train stations I've been to, there is only 1 or 2 ticket booths, travelers are expected to purchase their seats online and get the actual ticket from automated booths which have biometric fingerprint scanners on them to identify the traveler.

All the hotels I stayed in and even a $20 a room a nite student hostel uses magnetic key cards. All the public buses that I traveled on had no bus conductors, this was a change from my previous trip a couple years ago.

But there's one area where I can see an excess of labor being used - there are policemen or security people (mostly unarmed) all over the place. In the provincial capital Chengdu, I think I saw one light armored police car at every major road junction.