Thank God I was born in 70s

For Saturday night entertainment, I watched Phoenix TV's 9pm live debate (hosted by 胡一虎). Again, it's about the property prices (According to Contrarians it should be indicator that price is about to fall - hope they are right). There were some insightful comments - there are certainly not short of insightful people not in control of power in China. Anyway, it was lively debate.  It just got me into another point to be posted here.

I am not trying to be sarcastic by writing such a title. The reality is that those born in 80s, 90s, and maybe subsequent generations are, in general, less privileged than my generation (yes, 70s!). we had the chance of swimming naked in crystal water before growing up, being "the country's flowers" before going to college (if admitted), getting a job before leaving the school, paying affordable mortgages before getting married... Things just became dearer and dearer afterwards.

I have to pause and think how the next generation is going to prop up the social costs if there aren't significant structural changes made in the coming years. High property cost, as many blames, is driven by land cost and "excessive" local government spending.  I don't know what's excessive or un-excessive, but clearly there is already stress in filling up the budget, at the time when the national GDP is still going strong at minimum 8%+.

How long this 8% can be here, when the rest of the world want to export as well?  When US transformed itself into a consumer-driven economy, its GDP was growing at 3-4% when it was healthy. And it still ran on borrowing from the rest of the world.

Today's China is hard to sustain at 3-4%.  Simple reasons i have include:
* there is a bigger government to sustain.  Cost of sustaining the government should also include those "grey income" of the public servants as eventually productive labors have to bear it
* aging population and its healthcare costs
* less efficient use of resources as a result of wasteful state infrastructure investments in recent years and large sections of economy remained under state controlled enterprises

On the contrary, let's see what we have:
* less productive workers as a result of one child policy
* restrictive immigration policy, meaning less frequent exchange of capital and talents and potentially lower productivity
* other things - social inequality, lower education, etc...that points to a possibly lower productivity than today's US

Clearly GDP won't go on at 8%+ for ever.  Is China sustainable when it's below 8%? what about 3-4%? To me those are structural issues that needs to be addressed.  I have not found an answer so can only observe as it develops - that's what i can do as a "roadside economist" (watching events develop while standing on the road side).