Income is a terrible metric for identifying a developing country. Japan is clearly developed.

Housing in Japan is kept sensible in large part thanks to their land value tax for real estate.

Seems like a baseless claim to me. Even just visually their zoning (or lack thereof) is obviously quite different.

When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

> When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

Unless… you have a land value tax

The point of the economic numbers is that what's affordable from a Western perspective is not for a Japanese person. You're talking about a country where 50% of workers earn less than $25,000 per year!

Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'

shrug. Doesn’t contradict anything I said. Japan is not a developing country.

We can argue semantics, but I specifically said that "their economy is much closer to a developing country." This contrasts sharply against, what I presume is, our youth - when they were at one point set to become the largest economy in the world, and everything Japanese was state of the art + crazy expensive while quite affordable for Japanese.

Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.

And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.

The analogy of education to housing "bubbles" doesn't work. Housing bubbles are economically destructive because dropping prices induce new sellers to drop their price even further, which reduces the market value for everyone. There is a reinforcement loop.

No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.

Of course there's a connection. The most realistic reason people go to college is to earn more money later in life. Nobody would ever voluntarily go 6 figures into debt with the understanding that, at the end of it all, the best job they're going to be able to find is to go serve coffee.

And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.

>Of course there's a connection.

A connection, yes, but not a feedback loop. A drop in the value of a degree does not lead to everyone panic-selling their degree.

What you're describing is simple ROI---as the return on the education investment declines, people reduce their investment in degrees. But falling tuition does not further reduce the ROI, as in the case of housing where there is a general expectation of appreciation, and therefore, speculation.