The land thing is crazy. Buying at the right time means you get paid to live in your house. Then when you sell, they charge you capital gains so you can't buy the same house back with the money you just got.

The other thing that's crazy is how ridiculously cheap the same stuff is in countries with lower land prices, like South East Asia. A nice apartment with a pool on the beach is 1/10 the price of San Francisco. The food is cheaper, services are cheaper, etc ,etc. Meanwhile, people living in South Eat Asia running online businesses can make the same amount of money in the American economy. The manufacturing thing is even more mind blowing. The cost to manufacture in a developed country vs China is on the order of 20x cheaper. When Big Box stores like Ikea open in China they struggle because they can't charge western premiums for the stuff they're selling because of domestic competition and they have to lower prices by 50%[1]. That would be totally impossible in a developed countries!

Someone should go through the whole cost structure of a developing country manufacturing operation and figure out the reason they are so cheap. My hunch is it would come down to incredibly cheap food, provided by incredibly cheap land prices forming a foundation for incredibly cheap everything else. Garlic growers in the California central valley say that the price that the Garlic gets delivered packed and shipped at the grocery store from China is less than what it costs them to grow it before harvesting.[2]

[1].http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1300942/ikea-last-cra... [2].http://www.wbur.org/npr/11613477