Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism

http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue23/Locke23.htm

by sailormoon • 17 years ago

7 8 17 years ago

hga4• 17 years ago

A country where so many of the young (in this case, into their 30s) can't:

  Get full time long term work.

  Afford their own dwelling.

  Afford to get married.

Isn't "thriving". A county where the birthrate is the lowest in the world, where it's been lower than the death rate since 2006, is dying, not "thriving". By the end of the next century there won't be any Japanese left if the current trends continue, and I've read that no society with it's "lowest-low" birthrate has ever recovered....

docomo• 17 years ago

Good point, but this is in the context of a country that is extremely densely populated. A controlled decrease of the population may be beneficial. I have a feeling that the Japanese elite are well aware of the danger and may be able to remedy the situation before it gets out of hand.

hga4• 17 years ago

Given the demographics, specifically the need to support such a large retired population, it doesn't make sense to do that on purpose.

If the items I pointed out are a significant part of the cause, it's going to be very hard to reverse, since they've been trying to turn around their economy for a couple of decades without success (we now realize the recovery a few years ago was just another artifact of the world wide credit bubble).

sailormoon• 17 years ago

I have a feeling that the Japanese elite are well aware

I share this feeling, and suspect that is why cigarettes continue to be 320Y...

exit• 17 years ago

"Ironically, Asiatic Japan comes closer than any nation on earth to what Hitler wanted. It is a socially conservative, hierarchical, technocratic, orderly, pagan, sexist, nationalist, racially pure, anti-communist, non-capitalist and anti-Semitic society."

in what sense is japan anti-semitic? is that so?

hga4• 17 years ago

Yeah, I've never gotten that impression at all.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Japan, and the closing item sounds about right to me:

"Anti-semitic books are usually regarded as a type of 'Tondemo bon' (トンデモ本, dodgy/outrageous books), which covers a very wide range of occultist subjects, such as UFO's and psychic power, and generally taken very lightly."

Japan is also less pagan than you're think, e.g. there are a surprising number of recent Christian Prime Ministers.

Calling it "non-capitalist" may go a bit too far as well.

quant18• 17 years ago

The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which would then have excessive leverage to extract wealth ... Lifetime employment also gives companies an incentive to invest in giving their workers expensive technical training, since they know the workers won’t just jump to a competitor once they have it. Since a highly-trained workforce is one of the absolute keys to success in any advanced sector of the economy, this is very important.

This probably plain old doesn't work in a globalised world. If your best talent feel they're being undercompensated in relation to their knowledge (and they don't have much use for social status), then they'll emigrate. At the margins, this is precisely what seems to happen --- most famously in the case of Shuji Nakamura.

(To put the icing on the cake, I've read an even more conspiratorial theory than Robert Locke's: that the Japanese government deliberately sabotages their school system's ESL classes by overemphasizing translation work and underemphasizing conversational skills, to make it hard for people to emigrate successfully. [1])

[1] http://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/07/16/is-a-national-lack-of-e...

hga4• 17 years ago

I don't know about the conspiracy theory but it's pretty well established that Japan does the absolutely worst job of teaching ESL in the world. What they teach is required for the all important exams but is otherwise pretty much useless. It's hard to imagine this is entirely accidental and that no one has ever thought it should be changed.

From what I've read the current financial crisis has pretty much started the end of the lifetime employment model. It should also be noted that in the "good old days" jobs were dividing to high gain low risk (e.g. the lifetime ones) and low gain high risk. Those in the latter category are the ones who's pension records were lost by the prefectures.

Other observations: a lot of Japanese techies spent weekends in Korea on the QT helping Samsung etc. get up to speed on producing DRAMs.

Leaving Japan for very long has traditionally been a form of permanent exile. Those who come back aren't viewed as "Japanese" anymore.

In the dozen or so years I spent in and around the MIT community, I knew of exactly two undergrads from Japan, which is pretty remarkable given how attractive you'd think it would be to study there.

Then again, to a great degree the Japanese model for lifetime jobs was a total focus on the college entrance exam. That's all that really mattered, e.g. if you wanted to work for the Finance Ministry you'd get into e.g. Tokyo University, partly chill out for four years, and then enter the "real world" (such as it is). Doctors do a 3? year vocational college program (no liberal arts), but I don't know how much engineers and scientists learn their stuff in college.

For scientists it hardly matters, if they want to do real work in their prime they've got to emigrate since seniority rules in academia. It's telling that until last year or so every Japanese Nobelist had to emigrate to do the work that won him the prize.

Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism

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