Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

China's President Xi Jinping has been clamping down on the country's religions,

and oppression of the devout abounds.

Yet certain faiths are actually encouraged.

Our correspondent meets the followers of the sea goddess Mazu.

And it's precisely a century since the start of prohibition in America.

These days, drinking is in decline for cultural rather than legal reasons,

and the drinks industry is racing to catch up with abstemious attitudes.

We have proof. First up, though, housing in the Western world has become enormously expensive.

Politicians tend to like it when house prices go up. They think people feel richer, borrow and spend more, and that it gives the economy a nice

boost. But costly housing is bad for both those who want to buy and those who want to rent,

and it has much more profound economic implications. Housing across much of the rich world is

very, very expensive, and it hasn't always been this expensive. It's a relatively recent phenomenon.

Callum Williams is our senior economics writer.

And the problem with that is it has both massive economic consequences

and massive social and political consequences.

So it causes financial crisis after financial crisis.

For various reasons, it means that the kind of way in which

economies work, even when there isn't a financial crisis, is much less efficient. Economic growth

is generally slower. But then on the political side, there's more and more evidence which

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