Chapter 8 highlights the paradoxes of American and German housing policymaking amid surging house prices during the 2010s and early 2020s. American housing programs reinforced demand-led growth but also fueled financial bubbles and economic turmoil. In the post-2008-2009 period, this pattern persisted as policymakers continued stimulating housing-based growth, which simultaneously contributed to skyrocketing house prices, fears of a housing bubble, and an affordability crisis. In contrast, German policymakers retrenched housing programs that once supported the country's export-oriented growth regime by deflating housing costs. Consequently, they deprived themselves of the tools to respond to rapidly rising housing costs and affordability problems of recent years that risked fueling inflation and wage demands detrimental to export competitiveness. The conclusion of this book extends the broader lessons beyond the United States and Germany to such countries as Austria, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, illustrating how these countries' different growth regimes channel housing policymaking in different directions.

This chapter explores stand-up comedy in the UK arising out of comic song in the music hall. Spoken patter rather than songs became the centre of performances of the front cloth comedians in variety theatres, which continued until the 1950s. Subsequently, stand-ups found other places to perform, notably the working men’s club (WMC), with varied performance styles but a shared canon of jokes. The working-class Londoner is a performer and type existing across the development of stand-up. Alternative comedy arose from 1979 as a critique of the perceived sexism, racism and limited creativity of WMC comedy, and most comedians since have careers within these broad parameters. Despite this, inequalities still exist in the UK stand-up scene, and the consequences of the Covid pandemic were greater for comedians affected by inequalities of class, gender, race, disability, and sexuality who suffered more severe career setbacks, being less able to garner income online.

In the early 2000s, the idea of Japan as culturally “cool” captured imaginations. Propelled by a government interested in marketing and selling Japan, products from video games to anime and manga were repackaged as embodying cultural cool. And global audiences were reminded that what they enjoyed consuming, from sushi to Pokémon, were of Japanese origin. The capital of Tokyo, now virtually synonymous with the nation as a whole, was to epitomize this “cool Japan” with its technological sophistication, sleek aesthetics, and cultural creativity as host of the 2020 Olympic Games. Despite disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic, what the games reflected vividly was how the Tokyo metropolitan region, tracing a general trend that dated back centuries, had grown almost inexorably in size and in political, economic, and cultural gravity. Not just in historical patterns but in so many ways – from a city center that remains inviolate to the spiral that radiates outward, from the low-rise wooden buildings in the low city to the names of neighborhoods – the past remains deeply woven into the richly textured pastiche of contemporary Tokyo.

Crises typically originate in financial overshoot as mounting debt becomes unsustainable. Despite centuries of catastrophic experience with this phenomenon, policymakers have not figured out how to consistently avoid it. A strong human tendency to rationalize excess seems to impede recognition of a problem until it’s too late, in a "this time is different" mentality. Crisis situations put monetary and fiscal policy to their ultimate test. The Asian Financial crisis rolled across the region in 1997. As the epicenter, Thailand offers a window into the incubation and eruption of a financial crisis and lessons learned about policy response. From 2020, a crisis of a different sort has unfolded in the form of a shock to the real economy from a pandemic. The policy response to this crisis has differed greatly among Emerging East Asian economies with constraints on policy bearing on options.