Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-japan-invented-modern-shipbuilding

by m463 • 1 year ago

59 28 1 year ago

alephnerd8• 1 year ago

Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the average salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0]

A similar relative difference didn't seem to exist in the Canada (which I'm using to extrapolate for the US) around that time [1].

It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan. Essentially, shipbuilding in Japan in the 50s and 60s would have been the equivalent of being a Software Engineer in the US today, and it was treated as an engineering/STEM disciple [2] instead of as a blue collar semi-skilled discipline in the US.

I can safely say a similar trend happened in South Korea in the 1970s-80s as well according to one of my professors back in the day who specifically specialized in Korea and Japan policy and advised Hyundai and Samsung back then, which lead to a similar decrease in shipbuilding capacity in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, this trend can be seen to this day in any industry - be it chip design, VFX, battery manufacturing, etc.

I've noticed a similar trend in distributed systems/infra/os/networking/cybersecurity as well, where American schools skip teaching systems or architecture fundamentals in order to overindex on Theory/Applied Math whereas NAND-to-Tetris is the default philosophy in programs in Israel, India, and the CEE.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602

[1] https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statc...

[2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japan...

palmotea2• 1 year ago

Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the median salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0] ... It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan.

It would be interesting to use wage and salary controls to drive talented workers out of certain industries and into more productive ones. For instance, cap total compensation and benefits for people working in advertising (including adtech) at say, $130k/year. People working on cryptocurrency could be capped at 2x minimum wage. It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be supported, but it seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries.

alephnerd8• 1 year ago

seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries

That would only incentivize a brain drain. A good example of this is software engineering in UK, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Japan, as SWE salaries in those countries are not significantly different compared to other vocations.

Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively.

You can't "command economy" innovation - it can only be nudged.

The solution I've seen most industrial planners use is provide tax holidays and subsidizes for targeted industries, as this helps reduce the upfront cost of hiring, and does give wiggle room to raise compensation. Linking that with production, timeline locks, or even tariffs tends to help force an ecosystem to develop - which is what Japan used to build their shipbuilding and automotive industries in the post-war era.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 1 year ago

It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be supported,

It's sometimes controversial to claim this industry or that industry should be pursued at a national level, but this isn't the same thing as difficult. It's just that politics gets in the way.

And yes, shipbuilding should be one of those industries we pursue.

For that matter, I think you may have nailed the one industry we should punish.

bobthepanda2• 1 year ago

Japan, Korea, and China kind of did this, but not via direct wage and salary controls. Window guidance is the informal practice where government/finance officials tell banks which industries to prefer for loans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance

It only really works where capital markets are undeveloped or heavily restricted; and it does starve out the rest of the economy, which is bad for the not-chosen-few (e.g. South Korea's chaebols) and can also backfire if you end up being bad at picking winners.

caycep2• 1 year ago

I'm reading this blog, and the debate regarding the role of industry vs deindustrialization came to mind...was decline of shipbuilding in the US due to better paying jobs doing less dangerous work elsewhere?

alephnerd8• 1 year ago

The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular regional power that concentrated on our continent and some archipelagos with limited strategic value until WW2.

It was the UK that was the center of commercial shipbuilding before the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese took that mantle.

The US had a decent military shipbuilding industry, but they atrophed after the Cold War ended, and the incentive for naval warfare capacity receded until recently.

mandevil• 1 year ago

The US was never a commercial shipbuilding hub once the transition was made to metal ships. During the timber ship era, the huge quantities of quality lumber the US had meant that they were world class at shipbuilding, but metal ships? Not so much outside of direct production for the World Wars(1). I mean, the fact that the US passed the Jones Act in 1920 is a pretty strong signal that even then the US was not viable in commercial shipbuilding.

The US Navy, which has been tied for the largest or exclusively the largest in the world for over a century, meant that military shipbuilding was in a better state(2) but still not super competitive- few countries have ever bought the direct products of American yards- yards in the US mostly serve the USN and then sometimes the USN will transfer ships they don't need to other nations.

1: And even then, a whole lot of it was unskilled people learning by doing, and making mistakes.

2: There are many caveats, but it appears that British shipyards were probably more manpower efficient building warships than the US was in WW2. D.K. Brown discusses the evidence in _Nelson to Vanguard_. It's not perfectly clear- because hours were charged to contracts differently in the two countries, the fact that British ships charged fewer hours to a ship doesn't necessarily mean that they used fewer hours in actuality (while everyone counted laborers on a dock for hours, how do you handle hours spent doing accounts payable? Or material deliveries, or training? There are differences in how they were counted between countries, and Brown was unable to correct for them).

It is also true that the US produced warships faster chronologically, so it is possible that the US threw so many bodies at ship construction that they went past the point of manpower efficiency to get less time spent in the yards. But, overall, British shipbuilders seem to have been more manpower efficient than US yards during WW2, as far as warship production.

rufus_foreman• 1 year ago

"At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%"

dumdedum1232• 1 year ago

That's an interesting take. I read the article and it sounds like the US invented modern shipbuilding during WW2, and the Japanese just copied it and ran with it. But ok.

hbarka• 1 year ago

Have you not heard of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)? It’s quite famous with historic naval battles and modern battleships. But ok.

dumdedum1232• 1 year ago

I'm just going off the article. Did you read it?

ahazred8ta• 1 year ago

Japan had modern steel battleships in 1904. Dumdedum123 is talking about modern post-1930s shipBUILDING techniques involving prefab subassemblies.

barry-cotter• 1 year ago

Same things with statistical process management and quality control.

bluGill• 1 year ago

The us invented modern management in wwii - but it was perfected in japan after the war. Ships were built all over to old management processes but modern management made a big difference in cost, time, and quaity.

Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding

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