Book Review: The Land Trap, A New History of The World's Oldest Asset By Mike Bird

With protracted downturn in China's housing market, a common phrase is often quoted as "The housing market abducts Chinese economy".

As this book meticulously detailed, that phrase can also be applied to 80's Japanese housing market, Hong Kong's two hundred plus years policy of using land to finance government functioning, US's reliance on land financing to bootstrap colonial economy, and 2008's housing bubble in US. One exception is Singapore, who manages to provide a semi-market driven and rising housing market without economy being kidnapped by the housing market at the expense of other productive industries such as manufacturing and service.

Along the way, the book introduces some of the critical thinkers in land and housing policies, Henry George and his Progress and poverty, Wolf Ladejinsky and his land reform in post second war Japan, Korea and Taiwan

Correlate to this book, it seems the land price will either flatline or fall in fractured world where capital flow will be more intra-bloc and less inter-bloc.

Book Review: No longer human by Osamu Dazai

 Semi-autobiographical book 

Book review: In War and Famine, Missionaries in China's Honan Province in the 1940s by Erleen J. Christensen

 A memoir by a missionary's daughter on her father (a missionary doctor in Henan province) and missionaries in Henan during 1940's Japanese occuputions of Henan. There is a small part that told the work of OSS (a precursor to CIA) in Henan Tantouchen. One of my neighbor's father was in the book as a OSS radio communicator.

Book Review: Bad samaritans, The myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism by Ha-joon Chang

Since Reagon and Thatcher TINA (there is no alternative), neo-liberalism aka free-market free-trade economics have been a role model for decades, and the rightousness of neo-liberalism is further fanned by academics like Frances Fukuyama and writer like Thomas Friedman. But silver bullet neo-liberalism doesn't yield results it promised in developing countries adopting it, most of the initiatives World Bank/IMF/WTO implemented in developing countries didn't promote growth and economic prosperity. Instead countries like Japan, Korea and China who adopted policies that counter neo-liberalism actually produce sustainable growth.

This book is a look at globalization and neo-liberalism from the viewpoints of the developing(poor) countries rather that of developed(rich) nations , where infant industries protection are at odds with WTO/World Bank/IMF mandates on free trade and free market. A much naunced look at how China achieve the sustainable growth can be seen with Lin Yifu's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g6noa-Zgbo&t=868s, which is a viewpoint from China.

A debunking of Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the olive tree

Re-discovering Daniel Defoe's A Plan for English Commerce, a long lost treatise on true reasons UK became world dominant manufacturing power, not by free trade and free market, but by selective protectionism and high tariff

Neo-liberalism = Free trade and free market, Adam Smith

Civil war was a battle between Southern free-trade/low tariff slave owner vs Northern protectionist of infant industry/high tariff industrialist

"Despite being the most protectionist country in the world throughout the 19th century and right up to the 1920s, the US was also the fastest growing economy

Countries cited in the book: Britian, US, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Finland

So Trumpism may get a point on raising tariff.

Problems with SOE: Principal-Agent problem+Free-rider problem+Soft budget constraint

Success stories of SOE: Singapore airline, Korean's POSCO

allocative deadweight loss

Quotes

 "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." -- Martin Niemöller