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Final Part: After the Counting

Solving the problem is never a single step

@Mythogen Engine · Oct 24, 2026

The ledger on the wall​

In the tower, someone finally made the ledger public. How much each floor ate, how much the top took, all listed floor by floor and posted on every floor's wall.

The next day, the platform came down from the top as usual. The top ate first as usual.

The people below read the numbers on the wall and finally knew how much they had lost. They began shouting at the floor above, and this time they shouted numbers. The floor above had read the wall too, and answered: we only have a little more than you, go ask the people above us. The floor above that said: we bought our place with our own money, don't touch it.

Not a single number in the ledger was wrong, and not a grain of food on the platform was missing. The only change was that everyone could now quarrel with evidence in hand.

The four essays of “Snatching Rice from the Beggar's Bowl” kept asking for one thing: publish the numbers. This one asks: after the counting, then what?

1. Taiwan already counts​

The first four essays kept using Taiwan as a comparison. Most of what Hong Kong says cannot be done, Taiwan has done: involuntary job loss is caught by unemployment insurance, migrant-worker numbers are published monthly by nationality, and foreign and mainland spouses have been tracked continuously since 1987. On the measure of “counting clearly”, Taiwan is far ahead of Hong Kong.

But Taiwan's workers are not better off for it.

  • Wages standing still: in December 2018, real regular monthly earnings after inflation were NT$38,235, lower than in 2001 (TVBS).
  • Labour's share at a record low: employee compensation as a share of GDP fell from over 50% in the early 1990s to 43.1% in 2024; in the same year, the share of corporate operating surplus rose to 35.06% (Economic Daily News).
  • Homes drifting out of reach: Taipei's house-price-to-income ratio rose from about 6 in 2002 to 15.57 in Q1 2025 (Economic Daily News).

The numbers are public, and the money still flows upward. Migrant workers are counted by nationality every month, yet live-in domestic caregivers are still excluded from the Labor Standards Act and have long been paid below the minimum wage. Counting clearly only lets people see; whether anything is done after seeing is another matter.

2. A different dimension, or the same direction?​

The mechanisms in Hong Kong and Taiwan are almost entirely different, but the direction is the same: labour's share shrinks, and the share of assets rises with the tide.

LinkHong KongTaiwan
Housing protectionPublic and subsidised housing once covered nearly half the population; its doors have narrowed over the past two decadesSocial housing is under 1.5% of the housing stock; protection relies on an 84% home-ownership rate
Main reason wages are held downImported labour, tighter welfareA long-weak New Taiwan dollar, capital-intensive industry, migrant workers
What government relies onLand sales and land-related revenueExports and semiconductors
Population entryOne-way permits approved by the mainland; untraceable after seven yearsSelf-approved, published monthly by nationality
Who gainsLandowners, owners who bought earlyOwners of export firms, shareholders, home-owning households

So Taiwan is not a different dimension; it is the next checkpoint. Hong Kong's problem is that its protections were dismantled and cannot be counted. Taiwan's problem is that it can count, but the whole system was built to favour those who hold assets. Even if Hong Kong published every number tomorrow and rebuilt its public housing, what it would meet next is Taiwan's problem today.

3. The middle class is both victim and beneficiary​

This is the point the first four essays did not say head-on, and the least pleasant one: the voices that tread downward are not all misled; some of them are protecting their own bowl.

Taiwan's household home-ownership rate is 83.95% (Economic Daily News, citing DGBAS); Hong Kong also has a large class of owners who have “made it ashore”. For those who already own, rising prices are wealth, the removal of property cooling measures is good news, and low holding taxes are only fair. On one side they are employees whose wages lag productivity; on the other they are small landlords, sitting in the middle of the platform, eating rent paid by the people below.

The same person complains about wages after work, then goes to the owners' corporation meeting and opposes public housing nearby. He is not a hypocrite; his bowl simply sits on two floors at once: the labour bowl is shrinking, the asset bowl is growing. He rationally protects the growing one — and the price is paid by his own children and by those who come later, as the threshold for buying a first home keeps rising.

This is why “policy keeps inequality in place”. It is not only the top that wants it kept; many voters, many legislators, and many of the people reading this series are beneficiaries themselves. On the platform it is not only the top that takes more; on every floor someone is hugging their bowl tighter, guarding it against the floor below.

4. Why it is not simple to solve​

The first four essays pointed to land rent as the largest account. But anyone who tries to move land rent finds it chained to everything else: pull one link and the whole chain moves, then springs back into place.

Diagram

The chain reaction of pushing land prices down · six links

This is not hypothetical. Hong Kong property prices fell nearly 30% from their 2021 peak, and negative-equity cases rose to more than 40,000 in Q3 2024, a 21-year high (RFA). With land prices falling and the property market quiet, land revenue dropped sharply, and the 2024/25 deficit was estimated at about HK$100 billion (PTS). What was cut next were the things from the comment sections in Part 1: elderly transport concessions and student subsidies. Property prices fell by 30%, but the bottom did not receive any more because of it; the pain fell first on middle-class buyers who bought at the peak, then on people who depend on government spending.

Tax capital instead, and you run into the door described in Part 2: even the 15% global minimum corporate tax had to carve out an exemption for US multinationals. When one place tightens alone, capital leaves; the treasury's gap ends up back on land prices. So the problem is not that no correct policy exists, but that any single policy, introduced alone, is pulled back by the whole chain.

5. What can still be done​

No single policy can undo the whole chain. What can be done is to pull several links at once, and to pull slowly.

  1. Count first. It is not enough, but without it everything else is impressions against impressions. Taiwan shows that counting is not the same as solving, but Hong Kong has not even taken this step.
  2. Hold the floor. Anyone who falls should still be fed and kept warm. Once the floor is stable, the bottom need not fight to the death, and pressure stops travelling upward floor by floor. This is the conclusion of Part 1, and the cheapest link in the whole chain.
  3. Pull slowly, don't yank. If land prices collapse at once, the pain falls first on those who bought at the peak; adding public rental and subsidised-sale housing steadily over decades lets the ceiling on private prices return slowly, without sacrificing a whole generation of owners. Tax is the same: since 2016 Taiwan has applied a consolidated house-and-land tax, revised in 2021, which targets gains from short-term flipping rather than owner-occupier families. Once the direction is right, the force can be increased gradually.
  4. Stop treading downward. This one does not need to wait for government. Competition means each relies on their own ability; struggle means each floor treads on the one below. Small business owners and their employees, locals and newcomers, landlords and tenants are sitting on the same platform. Only when this is seen clearly can any voice reach the top.

Closing: the ledger is only the beginning​

Back to the tower. Once the ledger is on the wall, people on every floor can see how much those above took, how much they took themselves, and how much is left below. The hardest step is not posting the ledger, but whether, after reading it, anyone on any floor is willing to loosen the hand that is hugging their bowl.

Only after the counting do we find that part of what has to move is in our own hands. This is not resenting the rich, nor hating the poor; it is admitting that we too are on the chain, and still demanding that the chain be seen, measured, and slowly undone.

“Snatching Rice from the Beggar's Bowl” series: Prologue | Part 1 “Suffer If You Don't Work?” | Part 2 “Global Top, Local Bottom” | Part 3 “The Fraud You Can See, the Numbers Nobody Measures” | Part 4 “Those Who Leave and Those Who Arrive” | Final part “After the Counting”

Not resenting the rich, not hating the poor: struggle is not competition, and in the end it reaches every floor.

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