Category: Demographics

Doors of equal size: Part 2, left over women

31 May, 2013 (09:00) | Apartments, China, Demographics, Families, Global news, Housing, Markets, marriage, Speculation, Urbanization | No comments

 By:David A. Smith   [Continued from yesterday's Part 1]   Yesterday’s post on matchmaking in China, using an absorbing article in the New York Times (March 10, 2013) (channeling China Daily three years earlier), brought us two demographic realities: China’s wealth has been booming, leading to a widening Gini coefficient (haves and have-nots) and China has [...]

Doors of equal size: Part 1, excess men

30 May, 2013 (09:49) | Apartments, China, Demographics, Families, Global news, Housing, Markets, marriage, Speculation, Urbanization | No comments

By:David A. Smith   So bound up are we by our place of habitation (you are what you live in) that we use abode as a proxy for family status (household!), for social status (“they bought a McMansion“), for family configuration (“we’re moving in together”), and for health status (“we’re moving Mom to a nursing [...]

Filial piety — or else

15 January, 2013 (11:56) | Aging, China, Demographics, Elderly, Global news, health care, Innovations, nursing homes, Rental, Speculation |

By:David A. Smith   When a government is bereft of ideas to solve a social problem, it tosses the problem to the private markets; when it is bereft of money, it mandates that someone else pay for the solution.      [Governments' responses are so predictable because government is a factory that produces only two [...]

Not nice places to live: Part 2, boys to men

15 November, 2012 (09:30) | Apartments, birth order, China, Demographics, gender equity, Global news, Housing, Pension funds, population, Speculation |

By: David A. Smith   [Continued from yesterday's Part 1.] In yesterday’s post, using a good compilation story on the science fiction Web site IO9 (October 3, 2012), we explored the demographic consequences of over three decades of China’s ‘one-child policy’ and its resulting massive oversupply of men, and how it is now coming to [...]

Not nice places to live: Part 1, babies to boys

14 November, 2012 (11:30) | Apartments, birth order, China, Demographics, gender equity, Global news, Housing, Pension funds, population, Speculation | 2 comments

By: David A. Smith   I used to think that real estate was a society’s longest-lived asset, and therefore that the most important elements of public policy were those affecting property development – but now I realize there’s a longer-lived asset, whose public-policy impacts are even greater:   Better hope he’s a boy   That [...]