Overproduction of commodities is certainly a problem for capitalists. But the workers get to enjoy a lower cost of living. Like I would much prefer we built ghost cities (Chengdu was derided as a ghost city at one point) than have a decades long housing crisis with no signs of improving unless we deport millions of people.
Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada
anachrohack@lemmy.world 1 day ago[deleted]
zbyte64@awful.systems 1 day ago
anachrohack@lemmy.world 1 day ago
[deleted]zbyte64@awful.systems 1 day ago
Did you know that most of China’s debt is held domestically?
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, sure. China has a debt to GDP of 88.6%. That’s not great. Luckily we don’t have that problem in western capitalist countries, right?
- USA: 121%
- Canada: 104.7%
- UK: 101.8%
- France: 111.6%
- Japan: 251.2%
- Italy: 136.9%
- Belgium: 105%
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 1 day ago
LOL thanks for your unfunded BS CIA.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Much of the growth in China is entirely artificial and is basically a glorified jobs program. China builds tons of cities throughout the country to generate construction contracts and keep people employed.
I’d infinitely much rather have meaningful job programs that actually increase the real amount of wealth in the nation (such as public transport and housing) than whatever crisis the west has by building too little housing for people for the last few decades simply to make the cost of the existing real estate go up further so landlords can ask higher rents. What a nightmare, what a disaster. How could anybody shill for this?
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 1 day ago
I cant find statistics on total occupancy rates, but I never saw a high speed train in China that wasnt mostly full, and they mosty sell out days beforehand, so Im pretty sure that’s just someone making shit up. As far as domestic debt due to infrastructure spending, apply your model to Japan.
ALiteralCabbage@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I think people forget that many of the highways in The West™ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.
These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they’re being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding.
ALiteralCabbage@feddit.uk 9 hours ago
Honestly I don’t know enough about the way that it’s run to give a correct answer!
I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching’s cuts etc.) so there’s clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there’s a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn’t quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn’t comment on that really.
We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I’m sure some transport historians could set me right!
skisnow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I think that person’s logic goes like, “government run” = “artificially propped up” = “doesn’t count as real growth”.
It’s the final form of capitalist indoctrination to only be able to reason about other systems through its lens.
anachrohack@lemmy.world 1 day ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.
Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?
Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.
You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.
It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.
anachrohack@lemmy.world 1 day ago