Whatever happened to 'Japan'?
potlatch.typepad.com
potlatch.typepad.com
There are two major issues facing the Japanese economy. Nepotism of the old (there is a much more succinct word for this, but it escapes me) and the incredibly long life expectancy of the population. The nepotism of the old (someone please tell me the name for this) is causing issues in a few different ways.
The older government officials are notorious for taking private sector positions in the very industries they previously regulated. This happens so frequently there is actually a Japanese phrase to describe it (again I can't remember for the life of me what this phrase is). In America this happens, but isn't nearly as blatant or widespread. It Japan it is a near guarantee.
The older population in Japan has a stranglehold on influencing public policy. They are a huge block of voters who actually turn out for elections. They consistently vote for, or force politicians to push for, unsustainable short-term solutions to problems. Japan has a pension crisis similar to our social security problem. Everyone knows it is unsustainable, yet the older people vote for it and push the burden onto the young.
The young people entering the economy don't have the job availability they need. Old people aren't retiring as early as they once were and basically aren't getting out of the way for the young. People are living longer and need to work longer. As a result, young workers are forced to be underemployed and struggle to become part of the economy.
There is also the issue of failure being viewed as shameful. There is very little entrepreneurial activity going on in the country so they don't have this potential of creating jobs for the economy.
The long life expectancy is exacerbating all of the above issues. That said, Japan is a fascinating place, the projections towards the strain social security and medicare taking on our economy in the future are good proof that Japan may still offer insight towards our own future.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your argument or not, but it sounds like you're saying that the more old people work, the fewer young people can, i.e. there are a fixed number of jobs. If this were truly the way economics worked, then it would be easiest to find in places full of lazy and/or incapable people. This isn't the case though.
As long as there exist services or makable things that people want enough to spend money on, there are always jobs to be done. Maybe the issue is in education, willingness to retrain, liquidity of job markets, or hurdles to starting businesses, but I don't believe that old people working means that young people can't.
If 99% of Japanese companies truly did hire old people into upper management who weren't as capable as younger people at doing their work, the other 1% would eat them alive.
Disclaimer: I havent paid much attention to Japan for a decade, since my Brazilian-Japanese ex became ex. However, her family members spent a lot of years working for the second tier companies as "guest workers".
"Doing one's work" in the modern world does not happen in a vacuum. If substantial segments of the market refuse to do business with you on the basis of your age, yeah, you're not going to be quite the stellar businessman.
When performance is measured by how much money you extract from a few organizations (think government contracting, think enterprise sales, think manufacturing), institutional prejudice can become one of the primary factors determining success.
Older people doing jobs of that sort in no way means that there's a shortage of work younger people could do... unless you're implying that Japanese people are both
1) unwilling to purchase goods and services outside of large industries that discriminate against young people
and
2) incapable of creating goods or services non-Japanese would pay for
Most of the goods and services that I purchase, anyways, are enabled by some sort of expensive and heavily regulated infrastructure. Every physical object that I buy was produced by a factory and purchased at a large retail outlet. The main services I pay for are communication-related (cell phone, internet, etc. - huge infrastructure there), automobile maintenance-related, and liability-related (e.g. insurance), medical-related, and the occasional meal at a restaurant. The only ones of those that one can do as a small business are automobile repair and food services, neither of which are the first things I think of when I hear "upward mobility".
Basically every highly-upwardly-mobile profession relies on expensive infrastructure (communications), access to an enormous pool of money (insurance), good relations with government regulators (law, medicine, insurance, communications), access to a large distribution channel (retail), or manufacturing (retail). There are some peripheral service professions (advertising, real estate brokership, stock brokership), that rely on having a good relationship with a wealthy clientele, not to mention a good relationship with regulators.
Basically, upward mobility relies on existing infrastructure of some kind, and if someone who isn't you and doesn't like you controls it, you're fucked.
So, you know, they could write web apps, since no one really controls the internet. Maybe. And they probably won't get VC funding. Or get bought by a company, unless they're really profitable. Or get advertising deals.
It's only in web app land that 2) is possible without manufacturing, and the Japanese are at a steep disadvantage because of the language barrier.
Instead of hiring younger workers, Japanese companies shuffle older employees around in the company. Entry level positions are often taken by older employees who were unable to perform at higher levels. Instead of rotating these older workers out of the company, they are often given entry level positions that would normally (at least in the states) go the young workers.
This totally happens here, and there is a term for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics) (Revolving Door)
Almost everything you said about older people in Japan can be said about the USA as well.
This is an artefact of today, not the future. As has happened in the developed world the developing world will eventually see automation and robotics become cheaper than human labour. Possibly within the next decade or two. Once this point is reached and those countries haven't lifted themselves up they're screwed. They'll have a massive number of undereducated, illiterate and underemployed people.
This is not China's century as many people are saying. Robotics will turn vast numbers of people in to a liability, not an asset.
We're about to see a shift in the material world similar to the way the open source world changed software.
IMO, "open source" software fills the same roll as government spending on infrastructure. Basically, contributing a small amount of energy for a share of a public good has a net positive result. But, little changes from the perspective of a user or a developer.
If I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I am), a plurality (if not an outright majority) of web servers are run using an open source OS. jQuery/Prototype/MooTools together hold an obscenely high share of the JavaScript library market. The great majority of websites on the internet run some combination of PHP, Python, Ruby, many of those running open-source frameworks like Pylons, RoR, CodeIgniter, Kohana, web2py, Django, etc. A great number of developers code using Vim, Eclipse, or some other open source text editor.
And from the perspective of the user? It's hard to quantify this just by saying "Firefox" or "Chrome" or the "V8 JavaScript Engine". I think open source projects (like jQuery) benefit hugely from crowd sourcing their problems. By making their bug reports and code public, they allow someone like me to fork the project on GitHub, fix the bugs, and issue a pull request back to the master branch. They're basically fine-tuning their product without doing nearly as much work as closed-source shops without paying the person for fixing the problem. To the user, it looks like things get done quickly and bugs tend to come far less often (if the crowd sourcing is done right).
In my humble estimation, these are rather important considerations when judging the success of open source...and these are only web technologies.
Recently I find Visual Studio is a nice IDE and last time I compared them Eclipse was clearly worse (it's been a few years). However, I have used a wide range of things from early versions of Borland Pascal and various things I can't even recall on old versions of Mac OS etc.
GNU has impacted users lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.png
PS: Ok, I get that people feel the need to down vote when they have an emotional reaction, but how was that anything but a truthful statement?
Depends. If they can keep labour cheap enough, they won't be underemployed.
I don't worry about future under-education in the now-developing countries. Education is all the rage in most places.
No they didn't - the chips are now made in Singapore or Malaysia with Japanese plant. When did you last see a US mask stepper?
GM make a car as good as a Toyota? I think their current goal is to make a car as good as a Fiat.
The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas
In March 2007 IBM announced that the 65 nm version of Cell BE is in production at its plant in East Fishkill, New York
The quality and reliability surveys over the last eight years or so are not favorable to Toyota. US made cars are as good as any other, and the German brands have actually slipped a lot.
There are two interesting ideas on why Japan gets so dumped on as a failure, or "moribund".
1) While the Japanese people are doing fine, western banks and investors and businesses have consistently gotten soaked when trying to play Japan over the last 20 years. The people who write about Japan for the Wall Street Journal have a very different lens from an ordinary person.
2) The Japanese have strongly rejected the western liberal agenda, and it's working out rather well for them. Can't have people clued in on that, so write about "moribund" Japan. The Japanese remain nationalistic and race conscious. They believe in Japan as a unified cultural nation and reject immigration. This has a great deal to do with the high quality of life and personal safety in Japan. It also ties into how they maintain a public social welfare system that works comparatively well. They also believe in protectionist policies (rightly or wrongly), which do not appear to be doing a great deal of harm.
I also see stories, mainly not mainstream, about disaffection among young people with the conformity, the bullying in school, the lack of opportunity if you are not a graduate of U of Tokyo.
And then there are the larger issues that you get with an aging population where the replacement rate is less than 1. Who pays the retirement bills? We are facing similar issues, but without the same urgency.
This isnt real criticism, just impressions. I would love to have a Japanese native jump in.
At some point, the old people are going to start dying, and then there won't be anything to fund that debt anymore. So Japan will default. It will be the biggest sovereign default in the history of mankind. And of course, dead old people will be footing the bill. In the meantime, the birthrate continues crashing and the young in Japan will languish. This is why it's said that Japan will rot, but it will rot in isolation.
The big unknown that I'm interested in is how the collapse will take hold. There are two runaway trains that I can see. The first will be the debt. It seems likely that we will see a restructuring towards a bureaucratic economy that takes care of the old people, but eventually all the old people will die. Then we may have another runaway train if the mechanisms for defunding the services racket are in place.
I say the answer to that likely rhetorical question is YES. I've been traveling to Japan for business for 10 years and I think this difference in approach is the chief reason why most American firms never really 'get' Japan. Their business motives and market DNA are fundamentally different from America's devotion to growth and scale. In Japan it's not about growth, it's about consistency and quality, often even to the detriment of the business.
I think that's also why, in terms of tech startups, Korea & China & Singapore will ultimately leave Japan behind.
Labor prices went up to ours, people grew to want their pensions just like us, the old are living longer just like us, they now want the good things in life just like us.
In the short time since World War II, they have grown to have that good life. And in that they have become more and more plagued with the same benefits and detractions that we've been enjoying. During the time they were rapidly advancing, they had the same abilities as us, but a different lifestyle. And they beat us.
But what was the point of their growth? The point was to get to where we are. And now that they're the same as us, in the end, they'll just be the same as us.
China's the same. One day all of China will be just like America. And then they won't be competitive. Until then, they'll eat our lunch because although they can do the same things as us, they just don't yet have our standard of living.