BloombergBriefs’ Tom Orlik on a fascinating and revealing survey:

China’s households are massively exposed to an oversupplied property market according to a new survey by economist Gan Li, professor at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan and at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

A 2013 survey of 28,000 households and 100,000 individuals provides striking insights on the level and distribution of household income and wealth, with far reaching implications for the economy. About 65 percent of China’s household wealth is invested in real estate, said Gan.

Ninety percent of households already own homes, and 42 percent of demand in the first half of 2012 came from buyers who already owned at least one property.

“The Chinese housing market is clearly oversupplied,” said Gan. “Existing housing stock is sufficient for every household to own one home, and we are supplying about 15 million new units a year. The housing bubble has to burst. No one knows when.”

When it does, the hit to household wealth will have a long term negative impact on consumption, he said. China’s household income is significantly higher than the official data suggest. Average urban disposable income was 30,600 yuan in 2012, according to the survey.
That’s 24 percent higher than in the National Bureau of Statistics’ data. These results suggest official statistics may overstate China’s structural imbalances, which shows household income as an extremely low share of GDP.

Many wealthy households understate their income in the official data. China’s richest 10 percent of urban households enjoy an average disposable income of 128,000 yuan per capita a year, according to Gan’s survey. That’s twice as high as the same measure in the NBS report. The
poorest 20 percent get by on about 3,000 yuan, pointing to significantly greater wealth inequality than in the U.S. or other OECD countries.

The wealth disparity helps explain China’s imbalance between high savings and investment and low consumption. Rich households have a significantly higher savings rate than poor households. The wealthiest 5 percent save 72 percent of their income, compared with the national
average of 36 percent and 40 percent of households with no savings at all in 2012.

“The solution to boosting consumption is income redistribution,” said Gan. “Compared to the U.S. and other OECD countries, China has done very little in this area.”

The survey also provides insights into China’s widespread informal lending. A third of households are involved in peer-to-peer lending, according to Gan. Zero-interest loans between friends make up the majority. Interest, when charged, is typically high, averaging a 34
percent annual rate. That underscores the usurious cost of credit for businesses and households excluded from the formal banking sector.

On January 24, 2014, I posted Google chief warns of IT threat. Danny, my geek son, had been warning me about that for most of last year. It is now a reality. The Economist ran a great article (Tks Gary) on that last week (The future of jobs, The onrushing wave). Some excerpts:

(…) A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.

Answering the question of whether such automation could lead to prolonged pain for workers means taking a close look at past experience, theory and technological trends. The picture suggested by this evidence is a complex one. It is also more worrying than many economists and politicians have been prepared to admit. (…)

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. (…)

A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free no one doubts such mastery is possible, though the speed at which fully self-driving cars will come to market remains hard to guess. (…)

The machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer workers. Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.

Jobs that are not easily automated may still be transformed. New data-processing technology could break “cognitive” jobs down into smaller and smaller tasks. As well as opening the way to eventual automation this could reduce the satisfaction from such work, just as the satisfaction of making things was reduced by deskilling and interchangeable parts in the 19th century. (…)

There will still be jobs. Even Mr Frey and Mr Osborne, whose research speaks of 47% of job categories being open to automation within two decades, accept that some jobs—especially those currently associated with high levels of education and high wages—will survive (see table). Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.

And although Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee rightly point out that developing the business models which make the best use of new technologies will involve trial and error and human flexibility, it is also the case that the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers. Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.

In a forthcoming book Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth. The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics. (…)