Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

"My impression as to your cheap labour was soon disillusioned when I saw your people at work. No doubt they are lowly paid, but the return is equally so; to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied and easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of a national heritage."

This excerpt appears in Ha-Joon Chang's book "Bad Samaritans" and it was written by an Australian consultant with regards to Japan in August 1915. Chang also mentions Sidney Gulick's 1903 book "Evolution of the Japanese" which also stereotypes the Japanese as "'easy-going' and 'emotional' people who possessed qualities like 'lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.'"

I don't have details on Brazil, but I am almost certain that this "Brazilian time" is just a symptom of some completely reversible, systemic problem that is making it difficult to do business with high-technologies in Brazil.

View on HN

>I don't have details on Brazil, but I am almost certain that this "Brazilian time" is just a symptom of some completely reversible, systemic problem that is making it difficult to do business with high-technologies in Brazil.

Or inversely, it's a western problem that makes it difficult to live humanely and stress-free and incurs great human toll -- and at the point when we're so technologically advanced to not need it as much (but are great at creating busywork for ourselves).

“Western problem” yikes.

To write off the economic successes of the west under the guise of “problem” with western culture is deeply problematic. If you were to use this tableau to jump into an argument against societies that are captilistic and encourage the chasing of material wealth over the informal, beautiful moments that make humanity interesting you would have a much stronger case. I think we would all benefit if you were to sharpen your position, as there is something deeply intriguing about your point.

With that said, I also find issue with content of your argument. Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. A lack of punctuality that permeates a society to the point that it effects business strategy is problematic.

> Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.

You hasten to generalizations. It's entirely possible that the economic success of the Western societies had historic roots in the industrial revolution and the mechanization of human life it entailed. But it's very hard to prove the same reasons hold today - it might be the case where the historical effect is confused with the alleged cause.

The strong economic growth of countries like Brazil or South Africa seems to indicate that, at least to a point, economics can blend with a relaxed attitude. Modern technology, offline communications like email, telecommuting and just in time fabrication could well usher in an era of high prosperity and low stress. Maybe these countries are laboratories of the future.

>Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. A lack of punctuality that permeates a society to the point that it effects business strategy is problematic.

punctuality doesn't necessarily means efficiency. Punctuality itself comes at a cost. Somewhat similar to low latency. Your argument reminds about those Scrum proponents who tout that decreasing the latency and increasing synchronicity - what the Scrum is really about - would miraculously lead to throughput increase. Which it never does, and usually it has quite the opposite effect (exactly as expected from the systems theory and experience)

Whilst there may not be a perfect correlation between punctuality and efficiency, I'd suggest that it seems likely punctuality in business is more likely to be efficient than not.

For example if you have 10 people attending a meeting and all must wait till they are present before starting (a very common occurrance) having all 10 people turn up promptly is more efficient than having 1-9 people waiting for the remainder of the attendees to arrive.

>Whilst there may not be a perfect correlation between punctuality and efficiency, I'd suggest that it seems likely punctuality in business is more likely to be efficient than not.

Efficient towards what, and what for? Those are good questions seldom asked.

Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time. The ability in business for people to complete tasks in-line with when they were expected allows for better scheduling.

I'm not suggesting that everything in business benefits from being regimented but that meeting expectations allows for others to plan their time effectively.

Time where people are waiting for others to do work which should have been completed can often be wasted.

>Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time.

Then you must first consider the need to have the business or meeting in the first place.

In fact, people's time is only "wasted" because it has been made precious -- i.e. because it was stolen and/or sold. That's way more wasted time (they'll never get again) there, than in "wasting time" by not being punctual.

Societies studied by ethnologists had little care for punctuality. In fact the same was true for rural societies in Europe and the US as well (the US South was considered "lazy" and without a "sense of time" as well), and even urban life before the tyranny of the modern "always on" demands. For the upper classes, being fashionably late was a virtue.

Sure as I mentioned elsewhere I'm not arguing that meetings are an unalloyed good, what I am arguing is that where they are held, it is better that people are punctual, rather that non-punctual, and that there is improved efficiency relatively where participants are punctual.

Even more efficient is: starting the meeting anyway; publishing minutes so people can choose to attend or not; inviting fewer attendees; not having meetings about things which can be resolved by the teams talking directly to each other in their day-to-day work.

Yeah, it's a mistake to think that a meeting is always the most efficient way of doing things. Every meeting held costs the company thousands of dollars as people are not able to do other things during it, and so many companies just don't even think twice about adding anyone and everyone and don't think of how much it's costing them in productivity lost to other things because they just always assume that meetings are the best way to get things done.

I think it would be better if meetings were seen as the expensive beasts they are and only the bare minimum of people that can attend it, should attend it, and it should be considered (especially with routine meetings) whether or not the meetings even need to be held in the first place.

Oh absolutely, I'm not suggesting that meetings are always well run or indeed necessary, but where they are held, time management is important to get people in and out as fast as possible, which improves efficiency.

It's honestly blowing my mind that this point even needs to be argued. Of course being on time correlates with efficiency.

Have they ever looked up a store's hours before going there? Or gone to see a movie? Or met with someone else to do... anything? Or utilized public transit?

Of course it can be argued that, in a cosmic sense, maybe society is more "efficient" toward people relaxing and enjoying life if that train doesn't leave for another 45 minutes because the conductor felt like sleeping in this morning. But at that point, it's not a meaningful discussion.

Honestly it's difficult to imagine having the opposing view with any experience at all managing anything. Or even considering what it might be like to do so.

Indeed, it is a bit surprising to me that timeliness appears to be a debatable point in business.

Punctuality is a foundation of respect for other people's time.

Demand of punctuality is a demand on other people's time.

Punctuality is a virtue of slaves -- to other people and to the clock in general.

I understand your point, but you're wrong. Working with other people towards a common goal does not equal becoming a slave to them. It does mean however, that if you don't respect their time then your actions serve against that goal.

I think we are so deeply ingrained in thinking this way in some societies that we completely miss the forest for the trees. We forget what the overall goal is and instead focus mindlessly on efficiently doing little things that seem in that moment to be the goal at a drag on accomplishing the overall goal. We are not ants, we are thinking creatures who, given time and a relaxed attitude can come up with solutions that easily negate the need for the mindless ant-like efficiency that is more suited to ignorant creatures than thinking ones.

Do people often "work with other people towards a common goal" though, or only give the impression of doing so, by going through the motions, and being trapped into one of the default modes of making a living in modern society?

There is effectively zero cost to punctuality. If you have to spend 60 minutes in a meeting to get through the agenda items regardless of when it starts then there's no benefit to being late. Just show up on time.

>To write off the economic successes of the west under the guise of “problem” with western culture is deeply problematic.

Well, there is a problem with western culture in this area -- it can never be content, and its eating away the planet. It's own visionaries and thought leaders imagined a society of leisure and 3 hour workdays and such, but we have many times the efficiency per hour of previous ages, and people are overworked more than ever (not to mention increasingly in debt as well).

>Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.

Well, I'm against "economic success" beyond a certain point, and especially when it comes to the detriment of the society, and the environment. I'm for economic sustainability, and with utilizing the vast technological resources to improve life (as opposed to induce consumption).

I hope we can finally make some new expansion going on with all that productivity.

If you put the price on the free time (as e.g. opportunity cost, or cost of saving resources), you can see leisure as a form of consumption.

The problem of many Western societies is that the cost of leisure is too damn high for many.

This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster. So there is a range of maximum efficiency, which is hopefully far from 100 h/week, but also likely far from 10 h/week.

"Gig economy" can help: you work hard 2-4 months for a high rate, then coast 4-6 months at a nice place with low cost of living. The problem, of course, is that you must have saved a pretty thick cushion of assets for the case when a new gig is not coming when you planned.

>This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster.

I'd go further. Most products and projects are BS busywork, if not actively harmful and they shouldn't be part of the economy in the first place.

We've created a huge society middlemen, procurers, and snake-oil salesmen, and turned increasingly more aspects of life into commercial endeavours, where ever more people are constantly hustling and peddling something (manufactured crap, of which there are untold tons [1], planned obsolesce replacement products, their image, and so on).

[1] https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling. It's only filling it poorly.

Finding such toxic-but-still-used product is a good opportunity to both make a living and improve life in general. I suppose the hardest part is to detect and understand the real need being filled.

Certainly enough, education, and other ways to change culture, is a more profound way to change the way people fill their needs, and especially what they even perceive as needs. E.g. the need to serve a bloody revenge is by now mostly absent from a typical Western society, while the need to one-up a neighbor is still pretty widespread.

>If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling.

Well, I'm a believer in an objective world in which not all needs are equal.

I can accept that which need is important or not can be difficult to ascertain. But I also hold that in many, if not most, cases, it's very easy.

Despite the cult of the individual and the reverence with which subjective taste is held, I'd go on record to say that some (most) people have buy products that fulfill irrelevant non-needs.

For an easy to agree with (but real) example, heroin addicts ands Milli Vanilli listeners both buy products that "fill a need". The question is more whether they should.

If you think about the list of "irrelevant non-needs" from e.g. 15th-century Europe (your choice of country), or from any sufficiently different contemporary culture (consider China or Saudi Arabia), maybe your idea of "objective" needs will... expand a little bit.

If for some reason you prefer today's Western culture to that of 15th century, be certain that it changed mainly because of some people pursuing their irrelevant non-needs, as seen by then-contemporary "normal people".

> Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.

Unfortunately, the people benefitting from the 'economic success' aren't the same people as those who are required to be efficient in everything.

It would be much better to look at quality of life than at profits. The only thing amounts of money have going for it is that you can easily put them in spreadsheets.

It's amusing and in line with what my grand mother who grew up in the early 1900s Indochina told me about her (french) dad doing business there. The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first opportunity.

On a longer time scale, it is hard when you look at Italy or Greece today to think of how the same population was once Sparta, the army of Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire. Populations evolve.

  The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and
  men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation
  to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first 
  opportunity.

What has been the observation off late of those very same peoples? Have the perceptions markedly changed? If so, how?

I suspect if you looked for statistics on corruption perception, and in local faith in locally produced products, you’d see a situation where the Japanese trust their compatriots and the Chinese severely mistrust theirs.

I’ve lived in China for six years. The consensus among Western businesspeople is that if you have a joint venture it’s not a matter of if you’ll be screwed but when. Once you find a good contact in a company, someone who will deliver you the goods you wanted, at the time and place you wanted, in the correct quality and at the agreed price, you hold on to that relationship. Once they leave you have to go back to fine tooth comb quality control, asking every day on the status of the delivery, and going ballistic when someone inevitably messes something up. It is very, very uncommon for a foreigner to make a great success of a business here without a Chinese business partner but that business partner is their wife a large majority of the time.

The Party is a large part of the difference in culture. Taiwanese and Singaporeans are Chinese but they didn’t have the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward to deal with. Communism does bad things to cultures. I’m sure things will get better in time but I doubt it will be the work of just one generation.

Communism does bad things to cultures

I read Paul Midler's "What's Wrong With China" recently, the followup to his "Poorly Made In China", and his research seems to indicate that communism and the Great Leap Forward are not the source of those aspects of Chinese culture, that those aspects go back much further.

Definitely a fascinating read.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years and Japan deliberately "westernized" the local political and industrial culture. Whereas elsewhere the Japanese didn't see the locals as fit for modernization and so didn't bother. The KMT were beneficiaries of this when they took over the island, even though they implemented a program of sinicization.

Lee Kuan Yew famously fashioned Singaporean culture almost out of whole cloth as he believed that without a radical transformation in the social and economic culture that Singapore would quickly disintegrate. I can't find good quotes at the moment, but he had some really harsh opinions about the local ethnic Chinese culture from which he emerged; that it was corrupt, chaotic, criminal and an existential threat to the new nation.

The unreliableness of Chinese-made goods is usually due to incompetent Western firms cost-cutting and communication errors arising from cross-globe, cross-language collaborations. It's unfortunate nobody blames the CEOs for made-in-China, just the Chinese people for making it.

I'm not sure that swapping one incorrect sweeping generalisation for another is really the answer.

If you really believe that there are a lot of sourcing and quality control jobs here in China that would be happy to employ you if your Mandarin is as good as your English and you have manufacturing experience. All the people I’ve met in those businesses have a quality control everything attitude because if you stop checking they’ll start shipping you shit.

While I think your point rings true, trying to use your historical examples to point it out dismisses human migration among other factors that may have contributed. For instance, there is a good chance that most "Spartans" have died off as a people, since their population problems are well documented. and both the army of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire are armies of much larger territory then current Italy/Greece in their peak. And much of Macedonia of Alexander's early reign isn't part of what's typical Greece today.

That's just nit-picking about the complexities of history, but I do agree that the point that people and cultures can change is very true!

That’s fascinating! Does the book have any insight into how Japan made the complete 180° in I guess a few decades?

The Meiji Restoration was already incredible but I thought the work ethic was there throughout and helped make it possible. I had no idea there was also a revolution of work ethic.

Wait, what ? What makes you think (and other commentators) that it's the Japaneses who changed and not the view held by post-colonialists ? (Managers complaining about their workers ? How weird)

It wasn't just the Japanese. "Korean time" was a thing back when Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized.

There is correlation between stereotypes and GDP.

Like the sterotypes common in (Western) Europe regarding Eastern Europe, like for the Polish people?

>Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized.

Any links on this?

>Any links on this?

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...

TL;DR (it's a 213 page grad thesis) Old Germany used to be basically Hufflepuff, a simple-minded, loyal, obedient rustic bumbler who's too stupid to really be a threat or even much of a partner. New Germany arose post-German unification and especially post WW1, where the stereotypes shifted to the modern more sinister concept of a nation of amoral mad scientists and clockwork soldiers - largely as an attempt to justify Germany being the great rival of England.

That’s just extending the already existing stereotype of Prussians to all of Germany.

The Brits used to be

> passionate, melancholy, romantic, and tearful

https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-dixon/british-stiff-up...

> overly emotional before their country industrialized.

After all some of the most famous Romantic artists came from Germany: Heine, Beethoven, Hölderlin and Goethe himself. The latter's Werther was the most emotional novel until at least Madam de Bovary, which was written about 80 years later.

It doesn't go into specifics on what Japan did right, but it does make a very good point that there are elements of every culture which can either help or hinder economic growth and that the economy has a much bigger influence on culture than culture has on the economy. People are lazy because they are poor. Not the other way around.

There is a podcast episode by Dan Carlin which I'm listening to which goes into this issue in depth. Basically according to him the Japanese basically "imported" values of warfare from the Samurai class into the general population and created an expectation of going 'above and beyond' for even ordinary citizens.

Education. The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling that was accessible by a large majority of it's population.

They beat the Brits by about a decade.

Yep. Mass education (as opposed to high end elite education) can turn a nation of free people into slaves (or, as Japanese call it, 社畜: corporate livestock). After a century of that, they're losing their collective will to live, too [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan

So the lesson you learned is that mass education is bad? ...

Not mass education as in the abstract concept of "educating the masses", but mass education as its actually practiced.

>The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling

Are you sure about that? Compulsory education was introduced in Austria in 1774. Apparently Japan introduced it shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. If anything the UK was particularly late to the game.

> that was accessible by a large majority of its population

Austria had major attendance and implementation issues (e.g., only a 50-60% attendance rate) which apparently weren't fixed until the Reich Public School Law of 1869.

That said, I remember that there was a lot of discussion at one point about how individual behavior in countries that overlapped ex-Austrian/Habsburg territory could be mapped against historical (19th century) boundaries.

Getting back to the original point, Japan was successful because it had high levels of urbanization, which made state directed education more accessible and easier to attain. Other countries/territories implemented compulsory education well before Japan (e.g., Massachusetts first required compulsory education in the 1640s), but efforts either had comparatively lower penetration or relied on non-state institutions (e.g., the church or private institutions) to enforce.

I think the larger question, which has haunted me for a long time, is: how do you change culture on mass scale? Singapore is an example where brute force top-down was used. Maybe that’s the only way?

Total war, ending with a couple nukes?

Ask the Russians, they've been illustrating it's pretty easy in the US for years now.

In what way? Organizing protests?

https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/5paqh5/putins_...

Supposed Russian "bots" were tweeting at Merkel parody accounts?

I am not sure a racist account of 1915 Japan is the best source to explain Brazil's technology sector, to say the least.

I agree that a racist account of 1915 Japan doesn't really say very much about what's going on with Brazil's economy. But I do think it's important to notice that when the BBC is saying something like "Brazilians are always late" there might be more going on than just a lazy culture.

I was hoping someone whose started a business in Brazil would come along and tell me what it's like. I really know nothing about the country.

The article is talking about a party. Its not in the bussiness context, which as a Brazilian myself i can say, it works with punctuality as expected.

Brazil is a huge country, with 200M inhabitants, an area as big as the continental US and a diverse population composed of imigrants from all over the world. What we hear from outsiders is almost always based on local and limited experiences (like this one from the BBC, limited to Rio). There's no single "Brazilian culture".

There was a significant national effort to change the same "national character" in South Korea after the war. Massive initiatives to institute a "bali bali" (hurry hurry) culture in the workplace and was seen as a national strategic need.

Here's an interview with an industrialist that describes the transformation: http://blog.lucforsyth.com/2012/01/under-pressure-byun-ho-sa...

So how long does it take to change the mindset and behavior of a complete country? ~80 years?

And losing a world war? Something really shocking has to happen for the whole country to rethink ways of doing things.

Applied to other countries, what did the second one teach that the first didn’t?

repetitio est mater studiorum

“Repetition is the mother of all learning”

This is not useful in the slightest. What was different after the war was a late 20th century boost in economy for Japan. Does Uganda learn as much every day because of a quote?

It taught them that they're pacifists.

WWII Japan is the result of its about face, not its cause.

To anyone who finds this interesting and wants to explore this further: i can recommend the book 'Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction'.

Just a caveat, I am not an economist, and am quickly approaching the edge of my knowledge.

I think that time is not really a factor here. Institutions like the IMF and WTO passively suppress the economic development of poor countries by withholding incentives unless they behave like rich countries. I don't think this is done out of malice though, because I've met people who genuinely believe that forcing businesses in Mozambique to compete directly with the U.S. economies of scale "creates a level playing field" and doesn't inhibit their growth in certain key industries at all.

>I don't think this is done out of malice though, because I've met people who genuinely believe that forcing businesses in Mozambique to compete directly with the U.S. economies of scale "creates a level playing field" and doesn't inhibit their growth in certain key industries at all.

It's easy for someone to "genuinely believe" something when their career (as policy advisors, bankers, development "experts", etc) and perks is based upon promoting it and enforcing it upon others.

Without "skin in the game" everyone can be a good person with "great intentions".

Exactly, this is why extending scope of democracy (workplace democracy, more decentralization, liquid democracy, direct democracy etc) is important, intellectual/political/economic/corporate elites with power however much "enlightened" they are , without having skin in the game lead to disastrous policies.

One person, One vote is the least flawed way to gather signal from actual people who have skin in the game.

Direct democracy is still pretty awful though, especially for anyone who falls into any kind of true numerical minority category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority .

>Direct democracy is still pretty awful though, especially for anyone who falls into any kind of true numerical minority category

That's a generalization its opponents make, but it isn't true.

In most places where it was practiced (ancient Athens, short-lived anarchist areas in Spain, egalitarian communities, etc.) it was shown to be more benevolent and inclusive to "true numerical minorities" than most representative democracies. Heck, the US had segregation in practice up to the 70s, with blacks being a 20% or so of the population (and more in some areas), and gays were persecuted throwout Europe representative democracy or not.

Even more, the most horrid persecutions of minorities have happened under elected representatives (like Hitler), or authoritarian regimes (e.g. Stalin), as opposed to any "direct democracy".

It's indicative that the arguments in the lemma ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority ) are contrived though experiments and not historical examples.

There's no "tyranny of the majority" that's inherent in direct democracy, any more so than it is in representative "democracy". The tyranny lies in an orthogonal axis (namely: the prevalent passions and ideologies of the era), and can be applied regardless of direct or representative democracy.

> it was shown to be more benevolent and inclusive to "true numerical minorities" than most representative democracies

Source? Athenian direct democracy was only for males, legally sanctioned slaves and allowed for a simple majority to ostracize people. Sparta's direct democratic elements oversaw a large Helot slave population.

>Source? Athenian direct democracy was only for males, legally sanctioned slaves and allowed for a simple majority to ostracize people

That's irrelevant to the discussion though, as that was simply the norm then across regimes, not a special characteristic of Athenian direct democracy.

Not to mention that the US representative democracy was only for males until the 1920s, had slaves until 1865 and segregation until the 1970s. And that's 2.5 millennia later than that pesky Athenian direct democracy.

> That's irrelevant to the discussion though

You claimed "in most places where [direct democracy] was practiced (ancient Athens... etc.) it was shown to be more benevolent and inclusive to 'true numerical minorities' than most representative democracies." I'm disagreeing with that claim. I'm asking for a source for the the general claim because I'm confused about what separates "true numerical minorities" from other kinds of minorities.

I'm pushing back on the assertion that is has been shown direct democracy works well for minorities. It hasn't. (It has been shown that representative democracy works, or at the very least can be stable.) The tyranny of the majority has not been conclusively proven (nor disproven). This is an open question, and one that evolves as technology (and the population's education) progresses.

>You claimed "in most places where [direct democracy] was practiced (ancient Athens... etc.) it was shown to be more benevolent and inclusive to 'true numerical minorities' than most representative democracies." I'm disagreeing with that claim.

You can disagree, but not because ancient Athens had slaves or women didn't vote. That were common places until millennia later across systems of government, and not some inherent product of direct democracy (as opposed to representative democracy).

If you want to disagree, let's stick to differences in how the citizenry included or excluded in both is treated.

By definition, something found in both types of democracy (such as slavery or women not voting) wont tells us anything about how they differ.

>I'm asking for a source for the the general claim because I'm confused about what separates "true numerical minorities" from other kinds of minorities.

Nothing. I didn't chose the term "true numerical minorities" -- I just used the grandparent's (ff317) term.

I think its done out of malice however they dress it up.

Ignoring history of how stolen wealth from colonialism and protectionist policies of the west during the colonial era etc when its convenient to do so is nothing but malice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...

President Ulysses S. Grant stated:

    For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, Gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.

Now America and its lackeys in IMF and WTO want to do the same to the poorer countries.

If it is done with malice, it's the dumbest, waste of malice evil project ever because nobody really benefits.

It is not done with malice.

The IMF/WB believe that nations that have basic infrastructure, basic forms of democracy, low corruption and relatively open markets ... will be successfull. This is neither malicious nor entirely naive.

It's pragmatically naive when you consider the leader of some nation may take a 10% cut off the loan, hire his buddies to 'build the dam that never gets built' and then of course you have a nation in debt ... but those debts are not advantageous to the West at all, so the conspiracy theories are wrong.

Now - where there is actual malice is when a large, Western industrial conglomerate might win a big contract and so they influence, bribe, fake data - and then get the contract to 'totally overbuild' some kind of capacity leaving a nation with way more than they need. That's malice, but it's definitely not the IMF/WB or lending nations that win there.

Dogmas and ideologies of large organizations are almost as dangerous as their malice.

Many of EU & IMF bureaucrats genuinely believed that they were helping the Greek economy recover while they were actually engaged in destroying it.

Yes, I agree with that, however, their dogma is reasonable.

And no the Greeks destroyed their own economy though systematic hard and soft corruption, knowingly hiding irregularities, unwillingness to make any necessary reforms, etc. etc..

The IMF's 'dogma' operates under the assumption that there are conscientious, reasonable and rational actors on the other side of the loan.

One might argue that it is this assumption that needs to be revisited ... though what some lament as 'austerity' (required by lenders) to others simply is 'being responsible with the massive loan we are about to take'.

The fact that the Greek state is incompetent or corrupt was not unknown before the crisis. The banks granted loans to Greece knowing that the Greek state was incapable of paying back because they were certain that ECB (or EU) would guarantee their loans.

If you are assigning moral faults, then please do so for the banks too who made their loans knowing the facts & assuming that they would be bailed out by EU if things went bad.

A more rational thing to do would have been to force the banks to grant Greece a debt haircut, waiving off 50% of the loans, while helping Greece restructure its economy in a realistic manner.

Instead, many people especially at the EU saw the Greek economic problems as a moral failure of all the Greek people for which all of them, including pensioners, must be punished while safely bailing out the banks that originally lent. Somehow, it is unacceptable to blame the banks.

Not only that, but the average (Greek or not) person has no grasp of even basic economic policy, and can't see farther than "I have a job that pays well, so what if all the politicians are corrupt? It's not like I can do anything about that anyway".

The average Greek is in on the scam by not paying any taxes, or expecting to retire with full pension earlier than Germans do and voting out anyone who considers changing this. It's a problem from top to bottom.

"because they were certain that ECB (or EU) would guarantee their loans."

I doubt this. The ECB and EU have not ever done this, and thinking through it just for a minute means that this is highly unlikely. I can't fathom why anyone would actually think this is going to happen with any degree of certainty. But I get the impetus that 'way back in the 2000's' that people might have 'felt this way'.

Also - there's a lot of fault still on the side of the Greeks in this case.

Who exactly would force banks to grant Greece a debt haircut? And what would stop every other indebted nation from demanding the same deal?

A certain EU country exports it’s supposed tax revenue to Greece so they can use 90% of it to pay their multinational banks. They have to do it in a currency they don’t own and is overvalued relative to their economy. The country mostly pressing for this is meanwhile running an export surplus and apparently asking the same for every economy in the region. This is not sensible economics any way you slice it.

It’s happened before in history and even has a name: debt bondage.

Honest question: why would being an economist allow you to competently answer that question? Is knowledge of how to change the mindset and behaviour of a complete country within the purview of economists?

If you ask an economist, he will define economics as the study of human action, making him an expert on nearly (or entirely, depending on the economist) all disciplines, questions, and problems.

"You must be at the frontier of what you know and what you don't to be able to say anything at all" said some wise man.

“in establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.”

One generation. Hint: it involves women and birthrates.

High-jacking top comment to note that the original headline, under which most of any of the discussion was written was:

"Why Brazilians are always late"

Always being late, and always being late to parties are too very different accusations. If you just read the new headline ("In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party") and checked comments before reading TFA, you might be confused.

Similarly, I read Pachinko a novel about Koreans in Japan in the period 1910-1940 (mostly). Koreans were all lazy, unintelligent, untrustworthy thieves. A stereotype that few would still hold today.....

"Korean time" used to be a thing. Before the "Miracle on the Han river" (which was actually a carefully orchestrated economic development program run by the South Korean government and not a "miracle" at all) South Korea was one of the poorest countries on earth.

Being poor doesn't proof not being on time. It just means that they didn't have access to technologies that could have improved their efficiency.

Likewise, Germans were used or being drunk, largely unproductive and simple people. Then Prussia conquered conquered a large number of the german principalities and forced the other ones to join in a new German Empire. A massive economic boom followed, during which Germany was thoroughly industrialized.

Did you read a book on this?

Thanks for bringing up that book it was lost in my memories and now I just ordered it on kindle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com