18 ms·
The Mega Rich Have Found an Unlikely New Refuge
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thompo 10y agoexpensive, isolated, absurdly beautiful... i guess "unlikely" probably isn't the word i would use in this situation.
- doldge 10y agoI wouldn't exactly call New Zealand expensive? It's more expensive than say, south-east Asia (or similar regions), but then most places are. I would consider it cheaper than the US and parts of the EU for most things. Exceptions being certain imports (like cars) being more expensive due to the cost associated with shipping them. From experience this doesn't hold for smaller tech devices, for example I priced up a camera there vs my current residents (Dublin, Ireland) and it was about $1,000NZD cheaper to purchase in NZ (most likely due to being parallel imported from South East Asia). Reference: grew-up in NZ, and have been living in Dublin for the last year.
- adwn 10y agoFood is a lot more expensive in NZ than in Germany (to give one datapoint).
- soperj 10y agoClothes are also more expensive.
- RowanH 10y agoI can't account for Germany but from Canada it is more expensive but quality of fresh fruit and Veges is way better. Our standard of eating increased markedly moving back.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- doldge 10y agoThat's fair, and it's something I've noticed at supermarkets in Dublin as well. I think the price of eating out is comparable though. That said, I've noticed the portions of food tend to be smaller here in Dublin as well (I suspect being a metropolitan area the supermarkets cater more to individuals whereas the supermarkets back home tend to cater to families). For example, it's next to impossible to buy 1kg of Cheese here in Dublin as the largest you can get from a supermarket is 400 grams.
- EdwardDiego 10y ago> I think the price of eating out is comparable though. Eating out is cheaper in Germany (if you weight prices relative to wages) than NZ.
- twfarland 10y agoBecause it's fresh.
- switchbak 10y agoFor what it's worth, the used car market there is very cheap - no tax on buying/selling used cars, and an abundance of good vehicles.
- olyjohn 10y agoThat's because their inspections will pull your car off the road for the tiniest of issues. And inspections are every 6 months. It makes buying a used car risky, IMO.
- fweespeech 10y ago> I would consider it cheaper than the US The US is cheaper. I'm guessing like many people who don't live in the US you are thinking about the popular coastal areas and ignoring 80% of the land area. I'm talking houses for $125k and a total cost of living around $20k outside of the mortgage.
- lostlogin 10y agoYour view may be dependent on what you earn and what your housing arrangements are. Wages aren't usually high, and if you're in Auckland housing costs are pretty spectacular. 250% or greater in 5 years is pretty bad.
- fatdog 10y agoFunniest thing I ever heard about it was a girl from Cornwall saying "Ah, New Zealand, the thinking man's Australia."
- jazoom 10y agoI don't get it. Is that a Kiwi joke?
- idlewords 10y agoYou must be from Australia.
- EdwardDiego 10y agoI'm a Kiwi and I don't get it either. We like to point to Australia and say "Sure, we've got racism, but have you seen those guys over there?" so, we're a thinking man's somewhat racist post-colonial society? Erm, cool?
- nibs 10y agoAustralia is dumber than NZ. So the "dumb" NZers are leaving, and leaving makes them dumb, but their presence in Australia makes Australia smarter.
- pklausler 10y agoSo the average IQ rises in both countries, then. Sounds like a win to me.
- nisse72 10y agoAh! Which brings to mind the quote from former NZ prime minister Rob Muldoon, commenting how the large numbers of Kiwis emigrating to Australia resulted in raising the average IQ of both countries.
- gohrt 10y agoSimpson's paradox! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
- mountaineer22 10y agoISP pricing/caps?
- RowanH 10y agoI pay around 80nzd/mo for unlimited . Latency is not awesome. That was literally the only thing I was worried about moving back to NZ "how well will Netflix work and will managing servers drive me nuts". Netflix is still awesome, the round trip to US based servers is noticeable - 130ms west coast. That said I get home from work in the largest city and go for a swim in beautiful bay 2 mins walk from my door ...
- kchoudhu 10y agoDon't live in NZ, but somewhere similarly distant to the US West Coast. Server management is a pain in the ass -- all I can say is that deploying from colocated (i.e. close to app servers) jumphosts makes life infinitely less painful. How's the tech scene in NZ? My (academic) wife and I were looking at the map, and we were thinking that maybe NZ wouldn't be a bad place to work for a few years.
- gnat 10y agoTech scene: great -- plenty of hungry tech companies looking for talent. Xero, PushPay, TradeMe, Orion Health all hiring hard. Catalyst is the Open Source shop of choice. Happy to answer q's if you're curious. (me@gnat.me if you need to make 1:1 contact)
- doldge 10y agoIn the major cities you can get unlimited fiber with 100Mbit/s connection for around $90 NZD a month. in more rural area's the internet tends to be standard ADSL. (side note; the governments "fiber to the door" roll out is apparently 68% complete for urban areas as of June this year).
- lostlogin 10y agoAs an anecdata point, I don't know anyone with fibre and I live in Auckland. I get 3mb on a good day when it's still and sunny. Rain and wind lead to dial up speeds.
- wmeredith 10y agoIsn't the irony here that the world isn't becoming more uncertain?
- zardo 10y agoHere in the US, people seem less certain about the future than they were a year ago.
- hash-set 10y agoThe US Debt to GDP ratio has turned us into Japan. It's stagnation. It's hard to be optimistic in such an environment because nothing feels right and then we have a lying-ass government to further obfuscate the facts.
- branchless 10y agoHow odd. A former British colony with a land price problem washed through banks that are making life worse for working people. Most unusual. /s
- neaden 10y ago"House prices in New Zealand increased 12.7 percent in the year through October, and the average price in largest city Auckland has almost doubled since 2007 to more than NZ$1 million." That's about $730,000 USD which would make me worry if I was a New Zealander.
- RowanH 10y agoYes. Fact of life. More or less every day or so there's an article on the house prices. Lots of parts to the problem - trust me we worry. Not dissimilar to Vancouver or Sydney ...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- doldge 10y agoI believe most folk are worried, and the media has been referring to it as a "housing crisis". Notably the price increase has been limited to Auckland though (and Queenstown, but Queenstown is the NZ equivalent of Aspen, Colorado; which is to say it's a bit of a millionaire's club). Unfortunately the currently in power government has done a lot to court this outcome, and so has mostly been avoiding doing anything about it. I think they did recently step in to make it harder for Chinese investors to purchase property in NZ though.
- RowanH 10y agoLVR restrictions were upped in October to 40% meaning you now need as an investor 40% deposit for a mortgage in Auckland from the NZ banks (previously was upped to 30%). Things might be slowing down - open homes in my area seem to have less traffic on weekends ....
- EdwardDiego 10y agoAverage house prices in Christchurch just hit half a million, so it's not limited to Auckland and Q'Town, it's just that they were already crazy markets in the first place.
- EdwardDiego 10y ago
- clydethefrog 10y agoThe ultimate NIMBYs. The same people that are responsible for the many uncertainties multinational corporations bring and therefore stimulate the dangerous populism in this global age now go to Queenstown, have a pint and wait for this to all blow over. Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way...
- tluyben2 10y ago> Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way... Always thought it must be something with my taste but every time I see houses by 'the (super) rich' I think; why didn't you hire an actual talented architect?
- michael_h 10y agoWhat? You don't like columns?! Columns everywhere! What enormous weight are they lending their support to keep aloft? Why, it's THE EAVES! Those immeasurably heavy goliaths of the architectural world. Here come the roof ridges!!
- harveywi 10y ago> What? You don't like columns?! Columns everywhere! Form follows function when you're a fifth column.
- colanderman 10y agoYou might like (or already be aware of) this blog: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/ http://www.mcmansionhell.com/
- cafard 10y agoBuilders love the style because big is cheaper than good. I suppose that the really rich may like big over good style because it makes its point so obviously.
- jonnathanson 10y agoThere's a method to the McMansion madness: the houses are designed in a sort of modular style that assumes the owners will regularly reconfigure and remodel to keep up with the latest trends. Kitchen out of date? Gut the kitchen module and replace the parts. Home theaters are out, and home gyms are in? Gut the theater module and reconfigure it into a gym. Sticks-and-drywall construction can be demolished and rebuilt in practically a day. Room "pods" can be torn down, merged, or separated at will, with little impact on the livability of the rest of the house. There's a lot more (ostensible) flexibility in an amorphous blob of room modules than there is in attempting to maintain a coherent, symmetrical, balanced architecture. The traditional house is a fixture; the McMansion is a living, changing, multicellular organism. McMansion developers aren't selling houses; they're selling services. All of this runs parallel to, and feeds off of, the macro-social trend favoring interiors over exteriors. People care more about kitchen appliances and countertop surfaces than they do about architecture. It's crass, tasteless, and economically silly. But it's the prevailing culture. And it's designed to keep selling things.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kodt 10y agoJust don't try to plant your own garden!
- EdwardDiego 10y agoCan we not do that here please. :/
- FuNe 10y ago“The world is heading into a major crisis,” said Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in an Oct. 31 Twitter post. “I saw it coming and that’s why we moved to New Zealand. Far away & not on any nuclear target list.” It will probably ruin his day but the good thing with nuclear fall out is it's globalized nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29
- arethuza 10y agoYou do realise that On the Beach is a completely fictional account of the aftermath of a nuclear war? Fortunately nobody ever stockpiled cobalt salted H-bombs. Mind you On the Beach is excellent, but not as a documentary on what might happen after a global war.
- pitaj 10y agoSo the "source" the OP posted is based on something more like the doomsday machine from Dr. Strangelove than a real nuclear attack?
- arethuza 10y agoYes, the book On the Beach is from the 1950s not long after H-bombs were invented - it is mentioned in the book that a lot of weapons used in the war it describes were salted with cobalt to create large amounts of long lived fallout. This is perfectly possible but fortunately was never actually done - I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons. I can't remember if the cobalt bomb element is mentioned in the film versions but was definitely mentioned in the book.
- hga 10y agoI suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons. Not based on my understanding of H-bombs. For one thing, you need a tamper made of something dense, and depleted uranium U-238 is used if you want to roughly double your yield while massively increasing the fallout created, then it becomes a fission -> fusion -> fission bomb. Lead is substituted for weapons like the one off 50 Gt Tsar Bomba, even the Soviet weren't willing to damage that much of their territory, and there were minor details like pilot survival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba). That tamper could perhaps be made out of cobalt, or you could wrap the "physics package" in cobalt. But it would be a fairly daft thing to do, cobalt-60 has, compared to normal fission products, a long half-life of 5 years, so that which would eventually fall out of the stratosphere would make things uncomfortable for you (normally it will decay to a de minimis level by the time it comes back down in quantity). On the other hand, it was pure propaganda to suggest such weapons would kill all life on earth. Ignoring details like the impossibility of getting even enough distribution, and that the earth is big, really only issue for humans who want to survive it, who'd be in heavy fallout areas, and who had any time to prepare is having enough food until it decayed enough, more of a lifeboat ethics sort of thing instead of the all but explicit message that we should surrender to the USSR because we and they were so crazy we might do something like that (and evil; if we, the far more evil nuclear power after JFK and McNamara changed our policy to MAD, weren't going to do it, there was no danger).
- te_chris 10y agoFantastic. As a NZ expat currently resident in London it's depressing the way global market conditions have sent house prices skyrocketing in the places I'd like to live. My partner and I are doing well here, and we plan to go back to NZ one day, but in just 6 years since my partner's brother was here what we'd go back to has changed immeasurably. He and his partner managed to come over here when the pound was worth $3 NZD, rent was cheaper, save well and move back to Auckland when houses were depressed (2009-2010). Since then they rode the wave and now have a beautiful home with a view straight down the Waitemata harbour. My partner and I? We came here when the pound was at $2.10ish, not so bad I thought, not as good, but y'know, we make good money, we can deal with it. Then BREXIT. BOOM. Now the pound is $1.70, our salaries are, of course, still the same. Also a shithole house in Auckland in a bad suburb now costs at least $700k NZD - the first house that my partner's brother bought cost $650k NZD, in a nice suburb on transport links. The world is mad.
- pyre 10y agoThe fact that you're talking about $650k - $700k being in your price range means that you're doing better than a lot of people.
- Ductapemaster 10y agoWhile it may be true that the OP is "doing well" salary wise, your comment detracts from the point he is making. just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't mean that their problems are any less valid.
- yequalsx 10y agoI think it is more OP calling the world mad when $6000,000NZ is the price range for a "decent" house. Heck, even the ability to move to another country is luxury enough. The 1% calling crazy what the 0.1% do is laughable to most I presume. I'm in the 1% so I'm not sure how the 80% really view such comments but I imagine it's farcical to them.
- 10y ago
- FrancoDiaz 10y ago...have helped make the South Pacific nation -- a day by air away from New York or London Isn't that essentially anywhere on the planet?
- detaro 10y agoI think the point in this sentence is that most other "popular" places with international airports are closer and easier to reach. It's "a whole day, that's a long time to fly", not "just takes a day, so not too bad".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hash-set 10y ago"A day by air" doesn't really connote how arduous a trip it is from the states. It's a long trip, even by air.
- sevensor 10y agoI'll bet that flight is less taxing in the company jet.
- crummel 10y agoThere's not a lot of corporate jets with that kind of range. It's more Gulfstream ($60MM+) than Embraer, Lear, or Cessna (~$20MM).
- knz 10y agoI fly it at least once a year and it's not THAT bad if you get an overnight flight. Europe to NZ is a much larger ordeal.
- EdwardDiego 10y agoAnd by that they mean an actual frigging day - I fly to Germany often from NZ and it's 25 hours at best.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoSo, now NZers will not be able to afford to live in their own country.[0] The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing prices affordable to the rest of us. [0] Or at least not own a house.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago> The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing prices affordable to the rest of us. If housing prices are unaffordable, blame property developers and/or government. If they are unaffordable, that's usually a market signal to build more housing because "all these property developers in city X are making lots of money, let's build there too", which lowers the prices as more people get in, etc. Unless "Ah, but dealing with government there will cost more money than there is profit in the development, let's not build there" Also, the term unaffordable is relative. Downtown San Francisco is very expensive. It's not "unaffordable" because people have purchased most of those units. And that's just how markets work. You've got a set amount of X (like habitable living space), you've got a certain amount of people that want that thing with a certain amount of money to spend, put it to an auction to determine a fair market price. What's wrong with this equation exactly? Blaming people for outbidding you in buying a house is ridiculous, even if they outbid you because they simply have more money.
- pitaj 10y agoYeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. All of these people blaming the buyers for buying and the politicians for not passing laws to disincentivize them from doing so. The solution is to build more housing. Full stop.
- mattnewton 10y agoI think that rising populations and income inequality should work together to make home ownership harder for the majority of people in the developed world.
- drabiega 10y ago
- EdwardDiego 10y agoI really like it when Russian oligarchs buy entire beaches here. :/
- XJOKOLAT 10y agoReally sad to read this in a "wish I could preserve it just as it is" protective kind of way. It's a beautiful place. If any of you mega-rich are reading this. Please don't fuck it up. Consider your impact - and I'm not just talking about the enviroment.
- ryandrake 10y agoIf the mega-rich considered their impact--they wouldn't be mega-rich.
- jorblumesea 10y agoThe modern world has such a ridiculous disconnect. The people fleeing to remote places because of instability are the very same people causing these issues in the first place. Hedge fund managers selling toxic assets bemoaning the uncertainty of the financial world? And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or if the world economy collapses? NZ doesn't have much of an economy in itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming? It's even more hilarious because the reason NZ is a desirable place to live is because there is little money in politics and there are few class distinctions. How will that change when all the billionaires move there and want to get their way (and are used to the world conforming to the bank account)? Just another place for the wealthy elite of the world to slowly ruin, maybe the next step is the moon? The system is rapidly growing out of control and no one seems to be able to stop or halt the insanity. It's like we're all marching towards oblivion and everyone knows it but no one has the will to turn the ship around because the system incentivizes short term greed.
- beachstartup 10y ago> And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or if your financial firm collapses? NZ doesn't have much of an economy in itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming? these locations aren't just for vacations. they are stocked with supplies and probably guns and ammo. if the SHTF, they'll be on the first (private jet) flight out of london, hk, zurich, or new york. why do you think they chose a place so remote? there are nicer places a lot closer. they just don't have the infrastructure that new zealand has, and the natural oceanic protection. as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth crown. how convenient. it used to be normal to prepare for disaster. in california they taught us how to do it in elementary school in the 90s, for earthquakes. now people think it's crazy. it's not. normal people do this too. who do you think is buying up all the ammo before elections? i know people who have boats, trucks, etc. for the purposes of preparedness. one thing a fund manager or CEO knows how to do is hedge against risks.
- lumberjack 10y ago>normal people do this too. who do you think is buying up all the ammo before elections? The people behind the prepping industry are just affiliate marketers for the most part.
- okreallywtf 10y agoI've long expected these kinds of stories. The same people who have benefited from climate change and bred a lot of the chaos we're now experiencing will be able to live quite comfortably while the rest of us are left to deal with the consequences. This is one of the most distressing things about climate change: so much wealth was created at the expense of the planet and so little of that will ever go into fixing it. We will pay for it in terms of higher energy prices a million other ways instead. As the arctic continues to melt I expect there to be some nice openings in northern canada that are even more remote.
- hueving 10y agoNearly everyone benefitted from climate change. The only people who didn't are the ones living in remote villages that don't have electricity or any other modern technology.
- dyeje 10y agoWell yes, most people have benefitted, but their point was the extremely wealthy won't have to care about the consequences.
- lumberjack 10y agoThose who benefited the most are those who will be affected the least. Can you not understand why some people might be upset by this?
- dv_dt 10y agoFor some time now, we have been in a era where we have the knowledge and incentive to act, yet we haven't acted strongly enough to combat climate change. Nearly everyone benefited in the short term, but those with great wealth also have much more power to speed or slow the change away from fossil fuels. I think in general that power has been used to slow the fight against climate change.
- andrei_says_ 10y agoAccording to studies, public opinion has almost zero effect on politics in contrast to the opinion of the very few wealthy individuals and businesses who can focus their influence and lobbying and have custom legislation written for them. At least in the USA. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 We are ruled by a small oligarchy which sees itself as invulnerable to economic and climate change. This is why we're incredibly late to the game of correcting it.
- dharma1 10y agoI've heard this story in the past. People buying farmland and building air strips in NZ. Makes sense, it would be fairly isolated from turmoils in the rest of the world http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931325/Super-rich-buying-property-New-Zealand-bolthole-case-west-goes-meltdown.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931325/Super-rich-b... https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jan/23/nervous-super-rich-planning-escapes-davos-2015 https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jan/...
- mahyarm 10y agoWhen vancouver adopted a %15 non-resident house purchase tax, prices and demand dropped a lot. Maybe nz wants to adopt something similar, combined with singapore's for citizen public house purchase program.
- EdwardDiego 10y agoWe really do, the amount of foreign money in our housing market is quite scary (China is prominent in the internal debates, but there's a lot of money flooding in from the UK also, not to mention all the cashed up ex-pats coming home), as locals are ultimately competing against the entire world for property. A capital gains tax or land tax would be a good idea also. But our incumbent government is very reluctant to do any of that. Some people would suggest that large donations from foreigners with financial interests here may have influenced their thinking, but in reality most of it appears to be catering to the Kiwi baby boomers who a) own a large proportion of the "investment properties" (did I mention no capital gains tax?) and b) are the largest voting bloc. As their perception of their wealth is intrinsically tied to property values, anything that would depress property value increases would be politically bad. Same reason we're not doing anything about the pending state funded superannuation crisis - we don't even means test the bloody thing, which means that millionaires and paupers alike get the same level of government money when they hit 65 - but touching national superannuation is political suicide. This does imply an onus on the non-baby-boomer generations to get more involved in politics and start voting way more than they (we) do. I'm also starting to think that five year terms instead of our current three year might be worth a shot, as our politicians are very much focused on short-term never the long.
- briandear 10y agoA capital gains tax a good idea? No -- that would decrease market liquidity and make the problem even worse. France has high capital gains taxes and it means that people are less willing to sell houses because capital gains taxes eat the profit, so people tend to hang on to houses in the hope that in many years they'll appreciate enough to make swallowing the capital gains hit worth it. I have a place in France that I'd consider selling but I am not interested in giving the government a huge percentage of the profit. Meaning if I take a risk in buying and renovating something, my profit has to make the whole affair worth it. If I'm giving the government 34.5% of my profit, if my house was bought at €500k and my target profit is €100k, then that means I have to sell the place at roughly €635k instead of €600k. That knocks many potential buyers out of the market, thus means that the house won't sell as quickly. That also means that my capital is tied up in the house instead of moving the market in some other deal or otherwise putting that money into the economy some other way. The net gain from a capital gains tax is actually a negative when you count the lose of market liquidity resulting from capital gains taxes. Increasing the price of something lowers demand. If you increase the price of selling, less people will sell, causing house prices to increase. Capital gains taxes are always a bad idea. Capital liquidity is critical for an efficient economy. The only people who support capital gains taxes are typically people with little capital -- they don't actually understand how it works and the stunting effect it has on an economy.
- RandyRanderson 10y agoIn BC, Canada we laugh at your measly 12.7% and raise you a ~18% [0] for a total of +31.4% 2015aug-2016aug. Yes, you read that right. It's funny how this article's impression is "prices are returning to normal" when in fact the government's new token rules haven't had a chance to take effect and certainly haven't had time to be analyzed. Sadly, these new rules are just for show (an election is nearing here) and until effective reforms are put in place the bubble will continue to rise. [0] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump-in-vancouver-real-estate-sales-called-a-return-to-historically-normal-levels-1.3745825?kkk http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump-in-v...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- santaclaus 10y agoI always thought someone could make a fortune introducing insulation to homes in NZ. Loved living in Wellington, but my god, the homes there are the draftiest coldest places ever!
- fbreduc 10y agoWhat i think is funny is that the mega rich thing in a collapsed society they will be able to hold on to these areas? People... will just come and take it.
- ColonelPhantom 10y agoThey'll probably hire some security to keep people out.
- logfromblammo 10y agoAh. I should start a security business, then. It will remove the "finding the stuff" step from the "taking stuff by force" process.
- pitaj 10y agoAnd then they can acquire more land and spread out. And then they can let people onto their land and dictate laws about it. And then we're back to feudalism. Fun.
- fbreduc 10y agoWhy wouldn't the security people just take it then? in a time like that, clearly asking for help is a sign of weakness...going to someone stronger and begging to keep you in power? doesn't make sense.. in chaos people will _take_.
- 1_2__3 10y agoI know nobody wants to admit this but this is only going to get worse. India and China are going to eat the world, because this is a numbers game.
- dredmorbius 10y agoIt's much more a game of wealth than of population. India and China were the largest countries (or regions) of the world for most of the period from the fall of Rome through the early stages of industrialisation -- say the 17th century. But they lacked the global reach European nations established -- Portugal ("Bombay" comes from the Portuguese "Bom Bia", or "good harbour"), Spain, the Netherlands, and of course England. What India and China will need to compete with the West is a large wealthy class. That's going to depend on both the absolute size of their economies (or their capabilities to extract wealth by other means), and the size and wealth of individual members of their wealthiest classes. China's economy is pulling even with that of the US, though how sustainably it can do so remains a question. It has over three times the population, though, so the mean wealth will be smaller. What we're looking at though is the stratum of the ultra-rich. Here there's a fair argument that, say, China could produce more billionaires than the US, and if I'm remembering recent stats correctly, it's approaching that count. Again, though, that's somewhat shakey, and it helps to remember that such standings aren't based on liquid wealth (cash and equivalent holdings), but on the valuation of held assets. Should the Chinese or Indian economies collapse suddenly, those valuations will fall (of course, the same caveat applies in the US, UK, or EU).
- pitaj 10y agoI think there are some good arguments to be made that economic mobility is much more important to a healthy economy than any other metric, and this seems like one place where China may have a handicap. India, though, depending on the way their social structures move in the coming years, may have a good chance at surpassing the US in terms of economic strength.
- hga 10y agoIndia ... may have a good chance at surpassing the US in terms of economic strength. I would think sufficient and reliable electrical power would be a prerequisite for that, and to my knowledge that isn't going to happen in India in the foreseeable future.
- mishkinf 10y ago^^^^^^^^^ THIS IS More evidence that the condition of the world is degrading. Making huge sums of money is immoral. The 62 wealthiest people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people. This is completely immoral and should be illegal. The mere fact that a person has billions of dollars is evidence that there is tyranny in the world. The paradox of capitalism is that the more a capitalist succeeds in reducing his costs (labor), the less money the mass of people will have to buy the very products by which a capitalist produces and thus cannot sell the products and services he is producing. It is bound to fail in time... and after it does, we will have to find a system which puts morality and love for one another at the center of its goals.
- imron 10y agoRubbish. New Zealand's not that great. It's rubbish in fact. Please everyone stay away.
- kseifried 10y agoStupid question but how much medicine/drugs does New Zealand produce? Does anyone produce insulin in New Zealand? What about electronics? Components to repair electronics? Cars? Car parts? Lightbulb manufacturers? I'm guessing like most countries New Zealand is very dependant on global trade to make basic things work. If things are so bad you need the remoteness of New Zealand to survive I can't imagine global trade is going to be working all that well.