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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

Let's look at one metric that supersedes all (in my opinion):

According to, Japan's unemployment rate has been no higher than 6% over the last 32 years (1980-2012).It's currently at 4.5%[1]

Compare that to the US, who's unemployment rate has been at worst 10% over the last 32 years (1980-2012). It's currently at 8.5%[2]

Why does this supersede most other stats? Because we simply need to keep people busy "doing things", otherwise (as you're seeing in the US) riots/protests break out, crime goes up (crime is largely a result of poverty), and people don't have the means to keep themselves healthy. What more do you need from a society? I understand people will say "but we need growth". I ask why? What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?

[1]http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate [2]http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-r...

edit: 32 years...doh!

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It reminds me of my first time visiting South Korea. While there I observed people who's job it was to wear a cute uniform and bow to cars entering the parking garage at the local department store, people hired by companies to stand in the aisles at the local supermarket holding packs of coffee or shampoo or whatever and dance to loud techno music (usually young women in short skirts and thigh high boots, bizarre to see families shopping for vegetables, fighting their way around scantily clad 20 year olds in the middle of a dance routine around the cabbage aisle), and other similar, "keep people busy" type jobs. I'd be highly surprised if these folks made more than $3-4/hr, not even remotely a living wage.

- checking on the numbers, the minimum wage in South Korea for 2011 was about $3.75. I'm guessing when I first went there in 2003, it was even lower.

- in 2006 I visited and remember having to make my way around a gauntlet of guys in doorman uniforms, who's job it was to bow to people entering the hotel, and another guy who's job it was to push the "up" button to request an elevator. That's it, that was his entire job. For eight hours a day, he stood outside of the elevators, waiting for guests, and pushed the only button to request an elevator (there was no down button the hotel I was staying in).

So yes, while the unemployment figures were pretty good, the actual "work" that people were doing was essentially meaningless.

I've never been to Japan, but I'd be highly surprised if there weren't similar analogues.

A general point to keep in mind here is that unemployment numbers are hard to compare. The best example is a country like India which has no social security net to speak of, so if you're unemployed and are not rich you will actually die of hunger. Which means that the unemployment rate is actually the percentage of people who can afford to stay unemployed. A less drastic comparison might be between unemployed people in Sweden and the US. I'd think that being unemployed in Sweden is lot better than being unemployed in the US because of the US's lack of a medical safety net.

Similar logic applies to your example of people doing "meaningless work". There are lots of those in India as well. I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs. Life as a greeter at a mall or a lift-operator is way better than life as a struggling farmer. And this doesn't even consider all the second-order benefits these people enjoy. Life in a big city means better education, more access to information, more opportunities, all of which almost certainly guarantee a much better life for their children.

This was a bit of a rambling post, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that both comparing unemployment rates as well as comparing the types of employment on offer are too simplistic to make any useful judgments about an economy. I think some aggregate quality of life measure is what we really need to look at.

"I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs."

You're right of course, "meaningless" is probably too hard a harsh word choice. Looked at another way, dancing girls promoting powdered coffee mix probably moves a lot of coffee. And having a guy operate the elevator button made a 3-star hotel feel like a 4-star. In fact, one thing I notice every time I'm in Korea is that the level of customer service is generally very high simply because there's so many people working at places.

I was thinking of this the other day when I was in a Home Depot and couldn't find somebody to help me find a dryer vent for love or country. "If I was in Korea I'd have half a dozen employees showing me the aisle, and dancing girls promoting the product" I was left thinking.

All marketing is "keep people busy" work.

In Australia, people don't like service-people. There's this weird pseudo-independence thing, where we'd like to believe that we haven't oppressed any workers to get our cup of coffee. It's not a problem if the coffee was grown by plantation slaves, and made by a Philippino guest-worker on an exploitive H1B1 equivalent visa, but the waitress had better be quick, efficient, and get out of our way so we don't feel sorry for her. If it's a waiter, he'd better be even quicker, because we detest seeing men do degrading work even more.

So all the marketing is depersonalised. Cafes might have lavish interiors which were extremely labor-intensive to build, but the work is all done behind closed doors. People will pay lots of money for seamless advertising and marketing, so you can't see that a real human being had to put the sign together.

It's kind of strange.

I'm sure service people hate their jobs, and do kind of meaningless stuff, but no less than the rest of us.

Having worked in retail and service jobs, I can tell you that a generous fraction of Australian consumers rely on the lowly checkout chick / salesman / service assistant / phone operator etc as someone to prop up their self-worth through condescension.

If you want to do something bad to a person (i.e. slightly inconvenience them) it's a lot easier to justify if you hold them in contempt.

Reminds me of store self-checkout scanning machines. A lot of the time, they aren't actually faster than waiting in one of the staffed checkout queues—especially if they have a queue themselves, as customers operating the machines are inevitably less experienced at it than the cashiers are at operating the POS.

But people still prefer them. Why? I think it's a social anxiety thing. You don't want to think that you're wasting someone's time on your goods—showing them what you've bought, having them fuss over each item and acknowledge that you bought that—when you could instead check yourself out in relative anonymity. You don't have to make any small-talk, or even take out your headphones if you don't want to. It's really about eliminating the "friction" of the social norms involved with the manual checkout process as much as it is about automating anything.

I've heard of the ridiculously low wages in South-Korea. For example 7-elevens etc are staffed by students doing part-time work for a pittance. It's unfortunate, but what can you do.

In Japan, you'll see retirement-age men working silly pretend-jobs, like guarding a hole in the sidewalk and telling passersby to avoid it, as if the fence wasn't enough.

It's actually worse than that. Most students don't get part time work (most people I know here never worked before finishing their post-grad university). When you see someone young in a 7-11 they are probably stuck there. Education has such a huge social force behind it and every job is very competitive so you get people with masters degrees working sales jobs. For the folk who never did well enough to get into university they are often stuck in minimum wage jobs for life. No safety net means most people rely on their children to retire, if you were infertile or your children died you are probably going to be sorting garbage when you are 80 in -10°C temperatures. I stopped to talk to this old woman on the street yesterday, she's one of millions in her situation.

South Korea takes capitalism pretty seriously. Competition is real here and failure is ultimate. Japan still has a fairly decent safety net with their pension schemes. South Korea, however, does not and relies on children to deliver for their parents. When children don't (because they are poor, they died, they abandon their parents) it all falls apart and the government doesn't step in (which provides a pretty strong incentive to succeed).

Because we simply need to keep people busy "doing things"

I suppose we could employ people to dig holes and pay them for the job of digging holes for no purpose. That's not productive or is a good use of their time, unless it is spent digging useful holes. That's because we have a million other things that people could do help and help out. All we need to do is figure out how to employ people.

I ask why? What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?

Less time spent on farming, manufacturing, servicing, and generally working. More time for leisure and family, increased well being, increased lifespan(more is always better), supposedly.

However, we're not good at figuring out what we want in life and thus not spend time on leisure, family, hobbies, and things that are fun. Instead, we seeks certain job because they're prestigious, buy things merely for status symbol effect, and so on.

"Doing things" was mildly oversimplified.

That's because we have a million other things that people could do help and help out.

We do? Like what?

Cleaning up all that plastic crap that litters the planet, walking around in shady areas and watching out for each other. Basically all healthcare facilities I've seen were either understaffed or just barely above that, too.

I don't think we'd need to dig all those holes...

> However, we're not good at figuring out what we want in life and thus not spend time on leisure, family, hobbies, and things that are fun. Instead, we seeks certain job because they're prestigious, buy things merely for status symbol effect, and so on.

Doesn't that just mean that "what we want in life" is status?

> crime goes up (crime is largely a result of poverty)

While that may be conventional wisdom, crime rates have actually declined in the USA over the past 20 years: http://www.economist.com/node/18775436

> people don't have the means to keep themselves healthy.

Isn't that true only for US. Is employment also dysfunctionally tied to health insurance as it is in US?

> What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?

It depends who you ask. If you ask owners of large corporations they will look as GDP for a metric of how great a country is going. Doesn't matter if life expectancy is terrible, infant mortality, crime and corruption are high, no middle class, people living in shanty towns as long as GDP is booming the country is considered a success.

If you ask people what is makes a country good, they wouldn't care much about GDP, they would point to healthcare, crime, lack of corruption.

Unfortunately the news and the reports you get in the traditional media don't talk about that. All those analysts,"experts" and economists only care about the metric that large corporation care about. How many time have you seen on the news about "the average rate of depression in Argentina has gone up?". Not much right. But you might hear about how GDP is suffering.

>> people don't have the means to keep themselves healthy.

> Isn't that true only for US. Is employment also dysfunctionally tied to health insurance as it is in US?

Diet, stress, mood, motivation, and physical activity all have impacts on health, and all are affected by employment status. Doctors and medications, while undoubtedly important, aren't the whole picture. Most people are healthier without doctors but with a good diet, a decent amount of physical exercise, and a motivated, happy life than they would be with doctors but without all the other things.

But also once someone loses their job, diet, stress, mood & motivation would go down the hill. So the chance of getting sick and needing a doctor would go up, which, interestingly enough is when Americans get denied access to health care.

They eventually end up in emergency care and then declare bankruptcy because of the cost (therefore me using the "dysfunctional" label for it).

But the point was that it is hard to compare the two countries simply on unemployment just because more ties into it. Being unemployed in Japan and breaking a leg is not as terrible as being unemployed in US an breaking a leg. Does it mean Americans are more likely to be stuck working in shitty jobs, afraid to quit and move because they don't want to expose their families to the risk of having no insurance? I don't know. I suspect it plays a role.

I'm just saying that it's one of many factors, and I'm skeptical about overstating its importance because topical political issues are almost always overstated in importance. If we didn't spend a good chunk of the last four years, as a country, angrily arguing about socialized medicine, then socialized medicine would likely not be the first thing to pop in your mind as the most important factor. It's probably just as important that Japanese people eat a healthier diet and are less alienated from their families than Americans, but I wouldn't even claim any certainty there.

Not for me. Medicine has been in my mind ever since I made the mistake of going to the emergency room with a terrible cold when I was here as a student. I ended up paying $400 for 1 pill of codeine, waiting 2 hours and be seen by some intern. $400 in 1995 for a student who makes $6.50 in a university library part time -- is fucked up. I don't care how it is justified and explained. And that is just my experience. There are a lot worse. So I would have been railing about it anyway whether we had the debate or now. I have been mentioning that for years.

The fact that you personally had that kind of experience makes it even more likely that you're overstating the effect of the US health care system.

Employment, I ask why?

Seriously, full employment is a threat not a promise. Who wants to really work? For what?

Mandatory vacations, 6 months per year, 5 hour work day. Then we can have full employment.

As said in another comment, growth is required to spend more time with family, leisure and to do things that we really want. Well thats not the case, since no matter how much growth there is and how much an economy increases, leisure time, vacations and do what you want does not increase. Working more only produces growth so that a few people on this planet can do what they want, while all the others are still required to work more.

With six months vacation per year, people would still complain about having to work too much.

They would also complain that those who wanted to work 80 hours per week were stealing all of society's wealth, or something.

We all have our reasons for working. In some cases I'd much rather be at work than say sit on a beach. I'd get bored after endless days of sitting on a beach right?

I think this conversation could easily go into the "whats the meaning of life" topic, so let's try not to go there. My overall point is more so this, what's so evil/bad about the the so-called lost era in Japan?

growth is required to spend more time with family, leisure and to do things that we really want.

And yet Americans spend more hours at "work" than most other countries. How has our growth shown that?

"I think this conversation could easily go into the "whats the meaning of life" topic, so let's try not to go there."

Yes, exactly. What we do with our time here is quite important to discuss, and this is usually the entrance to idologies and political parties. I wish we could talk about that more. Do you really want to work 30+ years of your life, then retire hopefully with a small amount of money (if its not "eaten" by the economy), while the top dogs do whatever they want whenever they want? It would be nice with a more balanced approach to work. Not work for work, but work for play. Free will and all that, work if you will, but I highly doubt most workers today would choose thier situation if they could.

You have fallen for the fallacy that there's a fixed amount of "work" in the economy. That's been disproven time and again, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Rather, employment is a dynamic pie that can grow as more people add skills and put those skills to work.

Interesting fallacy.

However, you seldom hear anyone criticize work today, all the theories and economieswant people to work more. Why not work less? Why not work at all? How come that all the effeciency and growth still make people work? Isnt the mother of all invention necessity, to not do something mundane and boring while we could be playing and having sex or dancing.

Did humans always work since they began calling themselves human? 200 000 years ago, or any modern hunter gatherer society knew of work. Work is unnecessary for life. It is in fact harmful.

Just an idea to play with.

without doing work, you die. if you're alone, quite literally, as you would starve to death.

modern man is disconnect from nature and questions work. modern man is also very surprised when nature strikes back. a simple camping trip can suddenly become a life and death situation.

we live in a world of massive division of labor. hence questions like yours. money is abstract. so go on try living our there for a while, produce your own food and drink. effing hard work i tell you. a full time job.

The Bushmen were some of the last people on earth to live as hunter-gatherers, in largely the same way that all humans did before we fucked everything up with civilization and technology. They lived very communal lives, but they didn't work anywhere close to 40 hours a week, and spent most of the day chatting and making music. They seemed pretty happy until the civilizations around them came in and ruined their culture.

That's also completely controlled by where you live. There are a few places on Earth naturally abundant enough(and with climate friendly enough) to support a population with less than 40 hours per week per person, but I'd bet most of the planet doesn't fall into that category.

We can do it more or less anywhere, it's just a question of population density. A tribe that needs a few hundred square miles of tundra could live as well off of a few dozen acres of tropical forest.

Here's a bit of trivia for you-- the most "abundant" place on the planet, the place once home to the highest density of exclusively foraging peoples, is the area now known as Northern California.

>We can do it more or less anywhere, it's just a question of population density. A tribe that needs a few hundred square miles of tundra could live as well off of a few dozen acres of tropical forest.

Yes, it's definitely doable--I'm not arguing with history. I'm arguing with this

>they didn't work anywhere close to 40 hours a week, and spent most of the day chatting and making music

A tribe that lives in the tundra is going to have to devote a substantial portion of their time to preparing for winter. Which isn't going to allow them the vast leisure time enjoyed by African bushmen living close to the equator.

The Bushmen live in Africa. I would hardly call that environment abundant with a friendly climate.

It is very abundant and has a very friendly climate relative to a great deal of the planet.

By friendly climate, I don't mean pleasant 72 degrees year round. I mean you don't have to spend all summer chopping wood, and preserving food so you can survive through the winter, which is a vast swath of the planet.

Wikipedia suggests the Bushmen need to store nuts for the winter, and during early spring the only available food is game (all the plants are dead). But great point about not having to deal with snow.

Africa is a huge continent. It has almost every climate and environment available on earth.

The other thing Africa has is a collection of populations who have lived in their respective parts of Africa for millennia. So while the environment the Bushmen lived in may have been relatively friendly to them, it wouldn't be so friendly to a Kenyan or Egyptian, or a Serb, or a Cherokee.

Absolutely--some humans were forced into civilization by the poverty of their surrounding environment. Instead of adapting to suit their environment, they had to adapt their environment to suit them. But in almost every measurable sense, life in civilization was far more impoverished than the lives of hunter-gatherers. The only reason it won out is because it led to an immense consolidation of power--but it was centuries if not millennia until the typical member of a civilization had a quality of life comparable to that of a bushman, and even then it's an open question who's really happier.

People didnt live alone in the woods, so thats a straw man argument there.

Going about it to live together as a commune in the nature, that is success. Just cant be done today, as civilized people would be right there behind and kill them all/take their food/poison them and so on, just as is being done to hunters and gatherer communities who are left today.

People can live together and strive without working, when you consider hunting and foraging/gardening to be a game, and hunting is not considered work even by civilized people, it is something "recreational". Hunting or gathering food is usually done around 2 hours per day at most, depending on season and so on. Its just a fun life, the kind of life humans where made to live. Our bodies are not adapted to working at all. Our bodies and minds break down when working, even in nice office environments without much physical labor.

The reason why they want employees to work more is because they have skills and experience related to their job and they'll get more productive work done if you just get them to work 8 hours a day instead of going through the cost of hiring someone new for 4 hours a day. Each employee has a fixed cost in recruitment, training, management, turnover, per person costs and more that doesn't go away.

> What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?

How about the fact that, when we do well, we are a bit more likely to spend that 1% of our resources on new technology, and get stuff that we later take for granted, like flying through the air, curing nasty diseases, and having immense computing power at our fingertips that can reach any nook and cranny of the Earth within milliseconds.

The unemployment rate in Japan is low, but the (arguably more important) labor force participation rate has been dropping a lot lately: http://i.imgur.com/WJiUx.jpg

Of course, a big explanation for the lower labor force participation rate is the aging population.

In addition, the type of employment has changed in Japan. The career job is gone, replaced by temp work.

Where are these riots of which you speak? Crime is at multi-decade lows in the U.S.

> What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?

The need for constant economic growth is just a side effect of how a capitalist economy works. That's why they all go into deep shit when growth slows down too much or stops. Nothing good or bad per so about it, in my opinion (although the improvement of productivity has obviously some positive effects).

A lot of capitalists also promote growth, but growth is not a necessary condition for capitalism.

It's a necessary condition for a functioning capitalist economy. I can go into more details if you want, but the fact that the key economic indicator is GDP growth and that all economies go into turmoil when growth approaches 0 should tell you that this goes beyond the opinion of a bunch of people. It's an emerging effect of the rules of capitalism.

Just wanted to point one thing out: 1980-2012 = 32 years, not 22.

Especially interesting since Bank of Japan doesn't seem to have dual mandate to guarantee both maximum employment and price stability, unlike Federal Reserve.

From what you write, I think you might be interested in watching the Zeitgeist movies [1] and read about basic income [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_(series) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income

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