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SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.
Clearly they're doing something quite a bit better than the nations you profess are clearly superior. It's fine to say that you prefer Thai food to Japanese food, I certainly do, but I don't really believe it's healthier. For instance, it might not be immediately obvious but thai cooking uses a lot for sugar.
Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional. That tells us very little about the productivity of society in general, just that it extracts money from young people and gives it to old people. It might even be that having a dysfunctional housing market makes the economy more productive because it forces young people to work more. If a house cost 300k rather than 1.5m then people with decent salaries might very well choose to work less.
You also have to realise that this situation is even worse in Thailand, with housing affordability and household debt a far higher than in the US.
For all of the comments about carbs being unhealthy for the last decade, I often think of how Japan, generally considered to have a healthy populace, must have a distinct lack of rice and noodles in the local cuisine.
/s if unclear.
ETA: Also a glut of cheap local produce.
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I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really, just trying to point out how things are counterintuitive to common assumptions among most people from rich countries and how things I've noticed have changed my perception
Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...
Yes, you are.
And yet you fail to see the even greater dysfunction in the places you visit. You're just richer there man. Your analysis of the places you visit is just plain wrong, egregiously so.
What conclusions can we draw from your post? It's nice to be rich and the housing market is fucked.
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