{"id":5520,"date":"2012-07-08T08:11:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-08T00:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/?p=5520"},"modified":"2023-05-20T01:44:14","modified_gmt":"2023-05-19T17:44:14","slug":"the-price-of-the-great-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/?p=5520","title":{"rendered":"The price of the great City"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/damakey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/478022877_m.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Guangzhou is a great city. Great in a sense that having many skycrapers, convenient modern subway systems, Mcdonald fast food and Starbucks coffee.<\/p>\n<p>To live here is just like to live in any modern city in elsewhere of the world.<\/p>\n<p>To improve air quality, motorcycle is prohibited to ride in the city. People are educated&nbsp;to take public transportation vehicles, such as subway or bus, and the price is very cheap, It only take a few Yens. The longer the distance you take the more you pay. <\/p>\n<p>Beijing&#39;s subway taking care of their people and will cost a fixed&nbsp;2 Yens no matter how far you want to go, a Communism thinking and friendly&nbsp;to the environment&nbsp;Here in Guangzhou is the consumer pays based&nbsp;on the mileage, a more capitalism kind of thinking.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Good environment is a public good and we can achieve up to an optimum supply by proper pricing. But when the pricing is not correct, especially&nbsp;when future cost or external effect are not taken, the incentive to provide such public good would be weeker that it should be. This is what we call&nbsp;market failure. Then government ruling might&nbsp;help.<\/p>\n<p>I bought&nbsp;some local produce, two&nbsp;peaches and two apples, from the neary super market and found they cost me about 4 Yens each, about NT$20, not cheap as I thought.<\/p>\n<p>I&#39;m looking for a house to rent. 140 meter square (42.3 Pings) space apartment with furniture will cost me rental 7,000 Yens per month, that&#39;s about NT$33M per month, not cheap as I thought.<\/p>\n<p>The real estate agency told me the 42.3-ping house will sell for 5MM Yens, about NT$24MM, NT$550M per ping, very expensive.<\/p>\n<p>Then I sudenly understood why the pricing of the goods here&nbsp;are&nbsp;not cheap anymore.<\/p>\n<p>The landlord&#39;s cost of&nbsp;owning asset is higher,&nbsp;so the rental, and then the cost of using the asset to do business, and finally part of the cost has been successfully transfered to the vulnerable public, the consumer.<\/p>\n<p>Here&nbsp;to work in a resturant the monthly salary is only around 2M-3M Yens. But to eat a bowl of beef noodle&nbsp;will easily cost you 20-30 Yens in the city. No wonder the staff here will carry to the office the food prepareed by themselves.<\/p>\n<p>The landlord&#39;s yield rate on rental is about 1.6%, very low. I think either the price of asset is over a reasonable level or the supply of asset is high and the competitive market help contain the rental. But the original asset acquisition cost might be very&nbsp;low and the yield rate from landlor&#39;s point of view might&nbsp;be higher, and landlord&nbsp;would like to keep&nbsp;the asset in hope of further capital gain in the future.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Over the weekend, I found&nbsp;it&#39;s kind of hard to find a seat to sit and eat in the &quot;expensive&quot; restaurant. The consumption power is very strong.&nbsp;The increase of the salary might not be able to catch up the rise in the&nbsp;price of the asset.&nbsp;I guess&nbsp;there must be&nbsp;a lot people here should have already benefited from the asset capital gains. A sweet Capitalism poison to bite.<\/p>\n<p><span><span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/damakey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/478022910_m.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Damakey 2012\/07\/09 The price of the great City<\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guangzhou is a great city. Gre&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16332,"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5520\/revisions\/16332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damakey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}