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Where did Japan go wrong?
The big Asian bugbear of the 1980s was Japan. Japanese electronics were cheaper and better than the American or European, the production methods were superior, the workers more productive, reliable and lived longer. They were not merely competing America and Europe to the ground, they were buying them up.China is the bugbear of the 2010s. That were to be expected. But for a time traveller from the 1980s the surprise would be how thoroughly Japan has disappeared from the list of daily worries. Why is that?
Arigatou gozaimasu.
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It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.
3. June 2010, 18:06:00 (edited)
How do you measure whatever it is that you base your observations on? My guess was that whatever it is that made Japan a dynamic, resourceful, successful country is still there. China is coming of age internationally, but it has more than miles to go. Much of the junk that my grandchildren play with comes from China, as does much else. However, places such as Thailand are notable junk producers.
In terms of personal national income, China is far down the list and will be there for a long time. Japan is much higher. The US is above both.
In terms of innovation, check out the following:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_inn-economy-innovation
Originally posted by Jaybro:
Personally, I never saw Japan as somehow special, although it certainly made an amazing turnaround following WWII, and I certainly don't see China as such now.
The amazing turnaround happened a bit earlier - they went through a rapid transition from a feudal to an industrial society in the late 1800s / early 1900s. After WWII they only shifted their priorities away from the military and empire building.
FNORD14. Wipe thine ass with what is written and grin like a ninny at what is Spoken. Take thine refuge with thine wine in the Nothing behind Everything, as you hurry along the Path.
THE PURPLE SAGE, HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19
Originally posted by jax:
The big Asian bugbear of the 1980s was Japan. Japanese electronics were cheaper and better than the American or European, the production methods were superior, the workers more productive, reliable and lived longer. They were not merely competing America and Europe to the ground, they were buying them up.
With the exception of buying them up, What is up with the past tense? Japan following it's military escapade, transitioned into and competed in a economic war. Japan played its games to gain advantage over its competitors. Around the 80's it's previous strategy was turned turned disadvantage for further development. For example due to market manipulation the imperial palace was worth four times the value of California and yet it could not produce a return as an investment. In comparison California is one of the major world economies in terms of production. The value of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was artificial, while the value of California was realistically appraised. The lost 90's was spent adjusting Japans value into a more realistic valuation, this adjustment is still going on. Sort of like the Netherlands tulip collapse centuries ago. Japan is one of the major space players and plans to explore the moon with robots. Japan modernized and is respected, accepted and treated as an equal of any first world economy.
Originally posted by Jaybro:
My guess was that whatever it is that made Japan a dynamic, resourceful, successful country is still there.
Not a guess it is a fact.
Originally posted by Jaybro:
China is far down the list and will be there for a long time. Japan is much higher. The US is above both.
Exactly, Furthermore the question is will China be a team player like Japan or will the economic war transition into a military war.
Originally posted by Macallan:
In all fairness to them though, they weren't exactly your average feudal society.Originally posted by Jaybro:
Personally, I never saw Japan as somehow special, although it certainly made an amazing turnaround following WWII, and I certainly don't see China as such now.
The amazing turnaround happened a bit earlier - they went through a rapid transition from a feudal to an industrial society in the late 1800s / early 1900s. After WWII they only shifted their priorities away from the military and empire building.
Originally posted by Frenzie:
Originally posted by Macallan:
Originally posted by Jaybro:
Personally, I never saw Japan as somehow special, although it certainly made an amazing turnaround following WWII, and I certainly don't see China as such now.
The amazing turnaround happened a bit earlier - they went through a rapid transition from a feudal to an industrial society in the late 1800s / early 1900s. After WWII they only shifted their priorities away from the military and empire building.
In all fairness to them though, they weren't exactly your average feudal society.
If by 'average' you mean the holy roman empire, which lacked shoguns and self-crippling isolationism
FNORD14. Wipe thine ass with what is written and grin like a ninny at what is Spoken. Take thine refuge with thine wine in the Nothing behind Everything, as you hurry along the Path.
THE PURPLE SAGE, HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19
Originally posted by Frenzie:
All that fuss about recreating Charlemagne's empire. Maybe they should've spent their time a little more constructive so I'd have my freaking personal spacecraft.
Yeah, instead they ended up with a backwards mess of petty kingdoms that had to be beaten into kinda-sorta shape by the most backwards of them all
In a related note, you evidently played too much Civilization
FNORD14. Wipe thine ass with what is written and grin like a ninny at what is Spoken. Take thine refuge with thine wine in the Nothing behind Everything, as you hurry along the Path.
THE PURPLE SAGE, HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19
Originally posted by Jaybro:
To me Japan is titillatingly different. My experience with the Chinese is in comparison very normal, Hyperamericans on the Asian subcontinent if you wish.Personally, I never saw Japan as somehow special, although it certainly made an amazing turnaround following WWII, and I certainly don't see China as such now.
Originally posted by jax:
O_o hyperamericans...Originally posted by Jaybro:
To me Japan is titillatingly different. My experience with the Chinese is in comparison very normal, Hyperamericans on the Asian subcontinent if you wish.Personally, I never saw Japan as somehow special, although it certainly made an amazing turnaround following WWII, and I certainly don't see China as such now.
If anybody was wondering, I was talking about the chinese government. There people okay but their government is a bit you know....
Originally posted by Macallan:
Originally posted by Frenzie:
All that fuss about recreating Charlemagne's empire. Maybe they should've spent their time a little more constructive so I'd have my freaking personal spacecraft.
Yeah, instead they ended up with a backwards mess of petty kingdoms that had to be beaten into kinda-sorta shape by the most backwards of them all :right:
In a related note, you evidently played too much Civilization :left:
You can _never_ play too much Civ. :-)
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Originally posted by MXB2001:
Originally posted by Macallan:
In a related note, you evidently played too much Civilization
You can _never_ play too much Civ. :-)
I can stop any time I want
FNORD14. Wipe thine ass with what is written and grin like a ninny at what is Spoken. Take thine refuge with thine wine in the Nothing behind Everything, as you hurry along the Path.
THE PURPLE SAGE, HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19
Originally posted by Macallan:
Yeah, instead they ended up with a backwards mess of petty kingdoms that had to be beaten into kinda-sorta shape by the most backwards of them all
In a related note, you evidently played too much Civilization
In my experience what you conquer at the very beginning of the game may have major repercussions thousands of years later, but trying to conquer anything later on just drags you down scientifically and colonially. Until the modern era - that's when things get wild. FNORD14. Wipe thine ass with what is written and grin like a ninny at what is Spoken. Take thine refuge with thine wine in the Nothing behind Everything, as you hurry along the Path.
THE PURPLE SAGE, HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19
Originally posted by street_spirit:
Capitalism will look for the cheapest labour, no rich nation can provide as cheap labour as the third and developing world (aside from the prison population in america...), one big race to the bottom, full proof!
And how, pray tell, would Socialists go about it all?
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
"Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy." -President John Quincy Adams
Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your point of view. From the perspective of workers, it's bad, from the perspective of consumers, it's great. Everyone wants something for cheap, but doesn't want their job to be outsourced to somewhere where they pay people in pennies per day. (As China and India improve their education systems this is becoming more and more likely as more jobs can be handled in those areas. (India trains up a lot of computer programmers, eager to grab their share of the world's intellectual capital, so it no longer is limited to unskilled labour)
This is a problem for everyone, as they rely on us being wealthy enough to hire them, and we rely on us being employed to make us wealthy. I'm not sure how that is going to play out in the end.
This is another "market failure", but that term doesn't explain it properly. Worse, efforts to combat it often have their own detrimental effects that are as bad or worse than the problem they're intended to solve. (Stifling innovation and economic development in the 3rd world, or worse, stifling their ability to stop being 3rd world and join us in the wealthy world)
This is not a problem that has been solved despite the rhetoric of the free marketeers or the psuedo-communists. We do not know how to make the system better than it is now.
Japan, their biggest problem is that they have sacrificed well paying jobs for profitable businesses. Replacing workers with robots is profitable, but it damages the economy of the nation as more people are unemployed. And this trend will continue as robots become more and more useful.
Originally posted by Redem:
Japan, their biggest problem is that they have sacrificed well paying jobs for profitable businesses. Replacing workers with robots is profitable, but it damages the economy of the nation as more people are unemployed. And this trend will continue as robots become more and more useful.
Maybe the problem will be solved once robots can provide all of us with the standards required for living so we can focus on whatever we want without having to worry about money? Just think how much more productively you could spend your time without having to work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Don't people ever learn the broken window fallacy, when laborers in a certain industry are replaced by machines (or cheap labor from other countries), these laborers are now available to produce other (more luxury) goods and services and the world is better of because there are more goods and services available to everyone.
Originally posted by Frenzie:
Maybe the problem will be solved once robots can provide all of us with the standards required for living so we can focus on whatever we want without having to worry about money? Just think how much more productively you could spend your time without having to work.
I'm already there. But not good at productively using time. My posting here is ample proof of that.
Of course, that's just me.
Originally posted by arghwashier:
these laborers are now available to produce other (more luxury) goods and services and the world is better of because there are more goods and services available to everyone.
Isn't that called the Jabba Scenario?
Originally posted by thedawgfan:
Originally posted by street_spirit:
Capitalism will look for the cheapest labour, no rich nation can provide as cheap labour as the third and developing world (aside from the prison population in america...), one big race to the bottom, full proof!
And how, pray tell, would Socialists go about it all?
nationalise the infrastructure of course then there would be no need to make a profit. This would firstly help the environment as you could centrally plan the building of stuff so you don't have the luducriousity of it actually being cheaper to fly stuff from one end of the world and back and such like and ultimately without profit you'd cancel out the gains of out sourcing anyway.
Originally posted by arghwashier:
Oh brother, luddites are still around:
The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the nineteenth century who protested – often by destroying mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt was leaving them without work and changing their way of life. They have been proven right of course, we now have the oil spill and other pollution problems as capitalism churns out a glut of useless technology which will soon choke a gullible population.
Of course in time the quality improved, so these days the factories do not just produce quicker and cheaper, factory-made goods are better than artisan-made goods.
Originally posted by jax:
factory-made goods are better than artisan-made goods.
All the skilled artisans have gone! The Apple I-POD is high on my list of factory produced useless technology, demonstrating the gullible public IMHO.
Originally posted by leftwing:
All the skilled artisans have gone!
Not all of them, but it's now a niche thing for very rich people only. And to some extent they may also have gone from any single particular country and you'll have to look EU-wide for them.
Originally posted by leftwing:
The Apple I-POD is high on my list of factory produced useless technology, demonstrating the gullible public IMHO.
An iPod was good a decade ago, but these days there are certainly better options. I think Sony's players are really good in the sound quality department (including the cheaper ones), but they're somewhat limited in formats. Not any more limited than Apple's, though.
Besides, who wants to pay extra plus waste energy on a 50 inch touchscreen? My battery lasts for over 30 hours (up to about 40). Sure, Apple claims similar things, but you pay extra for the giant screen plus the higher capacity battery. Plus it remains to be seen whether one actually obtains such battery life in actual usage.
‘Just do it’ is no mantra for JapanOriginally posted by Financial Times:
It is commonly stated of Japan that everybody knows what has to be done. All that is needed is a leader with the guts to do it. This is a thesis largely devoid of merit.
Naoto Kan, the 16th prime minister in two decades, faces pretty much the same roll-call of problems confronted by his string of mostly short-lived predecessors. The economy is stuck in deflation, public debt is rising, the population is ageing and, more than 60 years after the war, Japan has still not properly defined its place in the world.