Still, even your chart shows a higher national price run up in the US than Japan. The homemade, pulled out of a bloggers butt chart says it was worse here too. They just tried to skew it to suit their arguement. But that chart is wrong anyway.
Japan looks at the value of the land under the building in their report. Not raw land. They publish a second report entitled:
“National Wooden House Market Value Index” which appears to be nothing more than a cost of building index.
Maybe that is because in Japan land is scarce and therefore it is common when you want a bigger or better house to tear down the old one and build on the same lot.
So, Japan’s version of our housing price index IS the “Urban Land Prices” report shown in the Economist/Case-Shiller chart.
Tell me were your reliable bubble blogger got his stats? Japan’s Real Estate institute does not publish housing stats like those shown on the blogger’s homemade chart. I am not for a minute implying that a blogger may make a less than accurate chart in order to support a point they are trying to defend or make, certainly not!
But where did he cobble together figures on the structures alone to add to the Urban Land Prices Chart?
It appears to me that proffesor Shiller, by using Japan’s own reports, used the most comparable chart. In which case we are much, much more screwed than Japan.
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Not sure where you conclude that Prof. Schiller had anything to do with that Economist article. It didn’t have a byline. As far as I can tell, they simply used his index to estimate the housing run up, and compared that to the land price run up.
However, the point I was trying to make is that the Economist was doing an apples to oranges comparison, and thus it’s conclusions are likely suspect.
