Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

> The USA did this during the COVID era.

Japan has being doing this for decades now and, AFAIK, there hasn't been any terrible consequences. What are they doing differently?

imf.org says Japan's dept to GDP ratio is 214% and the US' is 110%.

View on HN

Japan’s story is different - Japan has been battling deflation for decades at least partially as a result of a rapidly aging population with zero desire to import workers. Which is not a judgment of Japan, which instead chose to provide a much higher per capita stimulus to its people with a focus on the quality of life of the average citizen.

Perhaps not the best example to pick - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

Japan's ranking on the Human Development Index is ahead of the US. Do you think if they had charted a different economic course Japanese citizens would have a wildly better quality of life compared to US citizens rather than just being slightly better?

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

Japan's GDP today is roughly the same as it was in 1995:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263578/gross-domestic-pr...

That's pretty remarkable considering their aging population.

japan is mostly in depth to its own residents, while the us is owned by china.

update: first thing remains true. but china owns less parts of the us depth by now, its more distributed among other countries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com