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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Is there some sort of gross statistic that bears out this impact on the whole economy, other than your disposable income one? In terms of GDP and GDP growth, Japan looks like bottom of the first world country. The "conventional wisdom" is that Western countries are mostly the same economically.

Oh, Japan has lots of problems

The question is, why do the strengths and problems seem to balance out so much? If you have multiple independent factors, then the total variance sets an upper limit on the effect size of individual factors. So whenever someone says that a factor like housing or regulation or something else that some countries already get right, has a huge potential for economic growth, I look at the small variance between first-world countries, and conclude that either the factor doesnt have that much of an effect, or theres some sort of interaction effect that eats away most of the first-order-effect.

So, I found your claim that Japan actually is doing much better in the whole economy very interesting.

The western world isn't homogeneously wealthy though.

Most of it is within a factor of 2, which corresponds to about 30 years of economic development - and the bigger ones grow slower.

And Japan is at a minimum proof that you can have a functional and affordable housing market even with extreme land constraints and a high population density if you just allow more construction.

My beef is with the claim that this is keeping the whole economy down.

Disposable income after tax and rent is much more useful in predicting actual living standards than GDP per capita is.

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