Size Matters

Beijing has more modern architecture than perhaps any other city and more of it is going up every day.  Judging by the buildings you would think China is a rich country and it is but China is a rich country composed of poor people.  What China loses in per-capita terms it makes up for in volume.  We are used to thinking of total and per-capita wealth as highly correlated – the EU and the United States being key examples.  We need to rethink some issues such as inequality, power and foreign policy when they are not so correlated.

By the way, the architecture is great but hard to see!  Visibility is limited to 3 or 4 blocks after which everything is a grey haze.  I haven’t seen the sun for days. 

Also, I found a way to access Marginal Revolution using an anonymizer.  This is good since the thought that one billion could not access the wisdom at MR was deeply disturbing.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed