UBI and robust social safety nets should have started with the industrial revolution. Every time a machine, computer, or now robots, UBI should have increased and been given to more people.

I look at my own country of Portugal with a massive realestate prices bubble were more than half the youths only leave their parent's home after they're 30, more than 50% of recent graduates emigrating when they get their degrees and schools in certain areas lacking teachers because houses there are too expensive for a teacher salary, and think that maybe what China has there is actually good thing, not a bad thing.

Yeah, sure, "investors" are suffering, but why should the other 99% of people care?!

I do wonder what's going to happen to all that property as China's population hits 700,000,000 or so

Maybe if they actually built these things up to code it would take longer to build them in the first place. These things tend to collapse.

I agree. I don't think we had or have anything to fear. The Chinese educational system is built around obedience, cultural homogeneity, and rote learning. Sure, there are fewer protests, and there is less crime, but also a SEVERE lack of innovation. I can count on one hand the number of innovations China has exported to the world in the last decade. Everything they build of note is based on stolen IP and figurative and literal slave labour. The world is finally clamping down on the former, and China's social progression to a service-based economy is putting an end to the latter. Their comparative competitive advantages are eroding by the day.

They've hit the middle income trap while simultaneously upsetting all their trading partners. It's not going to be a pretty fall from grace. Fake numbers saying how awesome things are only work for so long.

I suspect a major reason for Putin's most recent crimes was to prevent his people learning how much their neighbours are prospering.

The half finished apartment complexes and ones that are collapsing already because they build them with bamboo instead of cement would indicate otherwise. Look up tofu-dreg projects/buildings for a good laugh. So much of the rapid construction done in the last 20-30 years in China is going to be in landfills far before it should be....

It looks like you mixed up the fields for your password and username. TL;DR: you’ve got a password-looking username

Also, I agree with your comment.

Are you talking about China or Toronto?

No thanks, China's infrastructure is of notoriously bad quality.

You're thinking of Ikea

I'm 99% sure they wouldn't pass a safety inspection.

Then they'll expend CO2 removing the abandoned structures, and building other things on top of some of that, and another bubble will be coming down the pipe sooner or later.

We need to fix the systems that let these bubbles occur in the first place