“Traveling to Shenzhen about a decade ago,”
I traveled throughout China 6 months ago on business. There were tall cranes filling the horizon with building projects. Nobody was working on the buildings. They had the concrete and steel up but other than that they were not finished and no work was being done. These were very large buildings, a standardized construction. I saw maybe 500 buildings.
It was surreal like a scifi armageddon landscape. I asked my host about them and only got that the government wants the rural people to move into the buildings. He had limited English so I didn’t push it.
The obvious financial loss was staggering.
Perhaps China can fill those empty cities with Central Americans?
Was there in 2015. Same scene with similar designed structures. In the middle of nowhere 30 similar 25-30+ story buildings in clusters dotted the landscape.
For those structures completed often times the surrounding land was not leveled or even paved.
More telling was the lack of clothing being dried on balconies or at windows.
The malinvestment between Shanghai and Beijing was pretty horrifying.
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Thank you, Dennis, for closing the loop on the insane number of construction cranes I saw in China a decade ago.
Communist countries can only accomplish "great leaps forward" by gaming the system. They are good at building a house of cards.
Bureaucrats — even well-intentioned ones muck up things because they disrupt the natural market-driven flow of investment risks and rewards that under-pin a free, capitalist economy.
If Black Swan author Nassim Taleb teaches anything, it's that equity (skin-in-the-game) investments and ensuring a fair playing field (national and international) are the best safeguard against waste, fraud, abuse, and the society-crippling practice of saving companies "too big to fail".