Doofuses who don’t know anything about economics might say that. (23-year-old bearded libertarians frequently know nothing about economics.) Adam Smith did not say that, nor would anyone who paid attention in class.
Various morons will also tell you that, say, universal health insurance causes unlimited demand for health services, thus making everyone sicker. That’s not true, though. “Some guys on the internet say X” is not necessarily an accurate representation of what X theory is.
So, a bit of a “got mine” mentality going on there as well? To be fair, I can see why they would resist increased housing when their rich neighbors are doing so as well. Why should I convert my 2 unit building to 4 unit, when down the street, they could build 4 2 unit buildings for every one house there is now.
One of the reasons that traffic is so bad is because people do not live near to where they work, so they have to take up a place on the road everyday to commute. With higher density housing in the places near where people work, then traffic actually becomes less of an issue. Why would you care about traffic, when you can walk a block to your job?
If more people live nearer to where they work, then traffic gets better for everyone.
Of course there’s the two body problem. Or more if the kids work. Unless we can both find jobs close to each other, one of us will be commuting. Although that’s better than both of us.
I don’t think this is a productive line of thought. France is different from the United States is different from China is different from Russia is different from India is different from the United Kingdom is different from Japan. Depending on what you mean by “socialism”, the United States was a pioneer in that ideology while France was busy dabbling in autocracy. But then again, France was both classist and capitalistic just before WWII, and the capitalist U.S. was strikingly “classist” well into the twentieth century. Depending on what you mean by “meritocracy”, China spent most of its existence as a monarchic meritocracy, then attempted to become a capitalist autocracy but decided a “communist” meritocracy was better.
But what has any of this got to do with Japanese housing policy?
~Max
Higher density means a higher chance that there is a suitable job for both of you in a shorter distance.
My sister used to live in a rural area. She had to drive 15 minutes just to get to town, and then another 15 to get to work. Her husband did the same, but in the opposite direction. Those were the only jobs that were available in the area. Certainly no traffic, but it was still a hell of a commute.
Then they moved to a city, and they could share a car to get to their respective jobs within a couple minutes.
You can’t assume these things- there is nowhere “down the street” where four 2 unit buildings can be built for every single family house currently there. Nor do most people in the neighborhood I’m referring to even drive to work - it’s a pretty dense neighborhood compared to to most of the country ( about 67 people per acre , or 42K per square mile) and has good public transportation that operates 24/7. The traffic/parking is not bad because everyone drives to work - it’s because people in this particular neighborhood (and some other nearby neighborhoods) choose to try to live a suburban life ( every adult has a car, don’t use public transit to go anywhere except work/school and often drive their kids to a school that is within walking distance ) in an urban setting where most houses do not even have a single off-street parking space.
But yeah,it’s absolutely an “I’ve got mine” mentality. My point is that the mentality is not restricted to homeowners.
“A hell of a commute” 
We commute 6 and 3 miles, taking 50 and 35 min, respectively, on public transit. Even if people aren’t going far, dense means the going is slow. Manhattan has a population density that far exceeds Tokyo, but the average commute (for people living there) is still half an hour, which is about average for the US.
I read that as “a hell of a good commute” but now you have me wondering…
Oh, trust me, I know. As I said, Adam Smith was a moral philosopher first, an observer of commerce second. And like most moral philosophers of his era, he was extremely optimist - that is to say, most of them operated on the belief that as education, literacy and interest in commerce grew among the population more and more people would perforce read/talk about moral philosophy and collectively become hella moral actors (or at least internalize the Golden Rule to begin with). All of his economic theories are predicated on actors being both moral, rational and intelligent, if primarily driven by self-interest.
This… has not come to pass, exactly :p.
There is nothing whatsoever implicitly meritocratic about capitalism. To whit : look upon the cratic-havers in America today, ye powerless, and despair.
And the French Revolution was not really about classism. It started off, and for a long time kept being, an economic crisis first and foremost. If anything, the overwhelming majority of the people were absolutely fine with classes as they were and the King being the King ; so long as the rich paid taxes and didn’t starve the poor in stupid schemes and speculations on grain. The only people who had a problem with the class system were the rising bourgeoisie, who chafed at being looked down upon even when they reached the highest spheres of power. That class did not represent the majority of the revolutionaries (let alone the French population), although it did manage to thoroughly betray its purported ideals soon enough…
This is wrong. That’s the average rent for a one-room apartment with a small kitchen - usually just a small counter along one side of the room - in Tokyo’s central 23 wards. The average for a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and dining room (that probably doubles as the living room) in the 23 wards is just shy of $2,000.
If you include all of Tokyo, you could probably find a small two-bedroom apartment for around $1,000, if you don’t mind a 90+ minute commute in to work - yes the public transportation system is very very good, and most companies pay for transportation, but it’s *extremely *crowded. Spending three hours a day crammed like a sardine is exhausting.
Housing in general is definitely cheaper in Japan compared to major cities in the US or UK - I paid cash for my four-bedroom house just outside of Shinjuku, for roughly what a down payment would have been on a three-bedroom house in north London, with a longer commute into the City vs a commute into central Tokyo.
One downside to lax zoning laws in Japan - neighborhoods are ugly. There are some exceptions, but in general - neighborhoods in the major cities of Japan are not pleasant to look at. Minimal space for parking, minimal green areas - even open spaces for kids to play are usually covered in dirt, not grass.
But the OP is correct in noting that housing supply in Tokyo has definitely kept up with demand, and with household sizes getting smaller in Japan, average space per dweller has increased, and is now essentially on par with most major European cities. It’s certainly easier for young adults just entering the workforce to live on their own vs what you see in New York, Hong Kong or London (people sharing apartments).
I’ve lived in Japan on and off for over 30 years and have never been rejected by any place I was looking to rent.
That is amazing. Do you look Asian? How many places have you rented? When I was renting 25 or so years ago I got turned down because I was not Japanese about 70% of the time I made inquiries.
Businessmen aren’t economists. You might as well compare a soldier to a game theorist, it’s an entirely different field.
Before Smith, people thought that you needed to be able to do everything yourself, since everyone was a competitor and you’re just losing if others can compete successfully.
Smith made the argument that you could give up entire industries and simply trade for what you need, allowing others who are more inclined to the work and more capable of the work to do that, and produce a superior product.
Now, he was talking about nations not individuals but it’s the same thing. Economies, products, and the welfare of people are all improved by allowing the market to find the most effective entity to do the desired work.
Economic hardship or no, France was still flirting with the early stages of Capitalist thought and that was completely peripheral to the revolution. At the time, the central economy was mercantilist (i.e. state managed), the middle class were largely practicing feudalist economics (joining guilds, paying guild dues, inheriting their profession, etc.), and the lowest classes were probably mostly villeins or some equivalent.
I’m 100% French in terms of ancestry. Caucasian, blond hair, blue eyes.
Let’s see - I’ve rented around a dozen apartments (‘mansions’ as they call them here) and detached houses in Japan over the years, in rural Mie prefecture, the suburbs of Osaka and all around Tokyo.
You left out a key word here: they have to be relatively more capable (ie, lower opportunity cost). A person (or country) can be ‘more capable’ in absolute terms in all goods, but still be better off trading with a country ‘less capable’ in absolute terms, as long one side as a ‘relative’ advantage.
Otherwise no developed nation would want or need to trade with a developing nation.
Did you use agents specifically for gaijin, or just normal agents?
Oh wait, I think I get it - you didn’t peruse the ads then find one you liked and walked in to ask about it. You just walked in and said show me some places?
I’ve usually just walked into the local real estate place near where I’m looking to rent.
They’ve shown me the full listings, not the ‘here are the gaijin-friendly’ places. I know because I’ve usually asked about notices in the window.
A few times I’ve called about ads about places (newspaper flyers etc).
Always got a viewing right away, and there was never ‘oh, sorry you’re a gaijin’.
Not saying it never happens in Japan. But if it was that common, I’d think I would have run into it at some point given my sample size.
Never heard of agents ‘specifically for gaijin’; sounds like a rip-off if you’re simply paying for the language service?
You were going into the shops by yourself? You’ve seen the ads with the “gaijin OK” box right? Your experience is out of the ordinary for me and every gaijin long-termer I know.
Counterpoint : insulin prices in the US. Or the subprime mortgage crisis. Or, to bring us back on topic, rents in Paris (which have been steadily climbing over the past 5 years despite repeated attempts by city hall to both build or subsidize new housing, control rents and discourage both slumlord-ing and overly air-bnbing). Which leads to people being forced to live ever further, commute ever longer and overtax public transportation. Like, rush hour had always been a thing as far as I’ve been alive, but these days you can easily have to wait 30 minutes for any subway you could *possibly *squish yourself into on some lines. We’d probably need pushers like they have in Japan at this point. People regularly faint, and woe to the claustrophobes.
The Invisible Hand does not work when actors are not moral and don’t give a solitary shit how many people are harmed by their unrestricted greed. Superior product my sweet Aunt Fanny.
Yes, but this tableau misses a key part : the population of France was 91% peasants. “The middle class” was, like, 5 guys shooting the shit at a café terrace :p.
Mercantilism wasn’t really a thing any more by the 18th century - the big economic crisis was in fact caused by an attempt at deregulation. Previously grains of various types were heavily controlled either directly by the State, or by local nobles/town councils/bishoprics/whathaveyou, you could only sell grain here if you had produced it there, couldn’t sell it higher than X or lower than Y, there were official stockpiles to be opened in various very specific cases which varied from place to place ; it was a huge complex patchwork system of local laws and special privileges and so forth established over the centuries to try and fix the whole “recurrent famines” thing. The physiocrats convinced the King that it would be a much better idea to just abolish all those trade barriers and, essentially, let overproducing regions feed any underproducing on the fly. Supply, demand, yadda yadda, Invisible handing before Adam Smith, in essence.
Which might have worked in the long run. In the short run, the nobles and middle class all rubbed their hands in glee at the prospect of so much newly possible speculation, started buying all the grain of overproducing regions to store it, hoping to sell it whenever prices got highest, in effect almost deliberately producing food shortages. For all the moneys. Soooo exactly what had been happening throughout the feudal era, which had led to those very regulations to be put in place to begin with. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. This was compounded by a long series of very bad years agriculturally speaking.
So that didn’t work out very well, and bread started growing very expensive in Paris, and then the King tried to stamp out the looming revolt before it had started, which of course directly caused a revolt. Cue pitchforks up the King’s palace.
That’s the “real” Revolution, and the datapoint that the overwhelming majority of the population really gave a shit about (well, that and their often absurd fears of getting invaded by entire armies of brigands. Also a recurrent demand was for peasants to be allowed to hunt - because, again, famines).
All the ideals, and the heads rolling, and the King trying to leg it, the proposals for more sensible and rationalized this and that and the heady speeches were basically just window dressing. It’s what we put in the history books and write like they were deathly important events because by and large the guys writing the history books were those 5 guys at the café ; but *none *of it concerned the greater French population in the slightest.
What did, same as it ever was, was “what’s for dinner ?”. And fucking with that economic reality is what caused the Revolution. It wasn’t peripheral, but absolutely central. To caricature a bit, the hungry proles riotted first, the bourgeoisie then asked where they were going, for they needed to know where to “lead” them 
Sometimes I went into shops or called the shops on my own. Sometimes my girlfriend was with me.
“I was rejected trying to rent a place” is something I’ve seen on a lot of forums. Oddly enough none of the dozens - if not hundreds - of gaijin I’m friends with or work(ed) with have ever experienced it directly. shrug
There are reasons why you might be rejected to rent a place that are only indirectly related to being a gaijin. For example, if you don’t have a credit history, or don’t have a guarantor, or don’t have high enough salary etc.
But those are reasons why you may well not be able to rent a place in the US or UK; when I was living in NY places I rented out had salary requirements (annual salary of xxx times the annual rent or something).
But some people will insist on claiming ‘racism!’ anyway.
Arguing over a restricted paywall article is kinda like pissing in the wind. It wasn’t that long ago at the peak bubble, that families were taking out 2 generation home loans (50 year terms that kids inherited). I lived in Tokyo in 1991-94, and my rokojo apartment of 17.69 sq meters cost IIRC ~$1500 per month at the time. I was in a decent area (Yutenji on the Ginza line)