▲ 39 points
back
68 comments
>Japan and Germany [...] share similar challenges — including their businesses being heavily reliant on fax machines, which are often used as an emblem of unshakable bureaucracies as both markets face an uphill battle to digitize.
Preach it brother.
>However, Germany lacks Japan’s unique currency woes.
Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany.
Also, dupe from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619
Japan is geographically larger than Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Germany is part of the European Union, which is 10x larger than Japan and a sixth of world GDP.
Why sixth? EU's GDP is #2 (nominal) lagging very slightly to US [1], or #3 by PPP.
Germany's GDP is #3 (nominal) or #5 (PPP) [2].
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany
UPDATE: fixed the statement, previous was about world trade share.
A lot of Japan's landmass is basically uninhabitable mountains, though. Not much arable land, for instance.
Yeah but it's mostly mountain. 11% arable (33% in Germany).
>Preach it brother.
Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.
It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
Wait, hold up. Are you saying that anytime you need to ask a coworker, or maybe someone one a different team, a question you send a fax instead of slacking them? Do you all have fax machines in your homes?
Hard agree. Seen too much shit like Kanban boards suddenly sucking because they’re digital and limitless instead of physical and limited in size, or schools sending avalanches of mostly-useless email and other digital messages home where before you’d just have gotten a handful of paper notes in the mail or sent home with kids.
It's similar to issues encountered with previous eras of industrialization: when you have a factory, you can make a lot of one thing. So you reshape society around that thing, and now one size fits all, even if it doesn't.
The thing digitalization solved was the paperwork bottleneck(access to raw data), not the information bottleneck(what people need to know to do their jobs). We have a surplus of global firehose information systems, but a scarcity of useful filtering mechanisms, most of them based on traditional indexing(date/time, alphabet, keyword search) or a black box algorithm that usually isn't tuned for your scenario. As well, there are a lot of unaddressed problems with data custody, where access controls tend to be very all-or-nothing and bespoken, and aren't generalized to the whole operating system.
Sorry, but this is not accurate: People messaging over Slack 100% makes us more effective. Like any technology, including printing 20 pages of status report, there are ways to be efficient with them, and ways to be inefficient with them.
The workforce right now are growing up as digital natives. Time to act like it.
The concept you're missing is that a barrier to communication, like sending the fax, forces one to organize their thoughts before impinging on another person's time.
So while digital communication has a lower round trip time, it also has a lower barrier to entry, which means you get more communications and they're less focused.
This leads to situations like my inbox, with 50 messages a day that are parts of huge unfocused threads and it can take 5 minutes of diligent effort to find out if my attention is even required, and at that point my 'action' will probably be to reply to the thread asking for clarification, setting off the same bullshit task for all the people CC'ed
>Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.
Haha, I can totally tell from your skepticism to digitalization that you're German and I agree with your take that that's exactly how digitalization is or will be handled in Germany. Per its track record, if there is a way digitalization could make something annoying even worse, then I am 100% confident that Germany will find it and implement it.
While in the UK/NL or Scandinavia digitalization means replacing 20 pieces of paper with one web form, in Germany I totally expect those 20 pieces of paper to be replaced with 1500 emails while also pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result than when things were paper based. This would be the most typical German government thing ever.
>It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive.
Everyone trapping on your shoulder in person every 5 minutes will make you easily just as unproductive or more.
Has it occurred to you in your example that the interruptions are the main problem and not the communication medium?
At least on slack I can disable notifications or close the app. I can't disable my helicopter boss from buzzing me in person.
>It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
What are you talking about? How's productivity are you referring to? Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany, both for businesses and for citizens.
> pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result
That also happens in the UK, don't worry - except in British Pounds.
> Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany
It is. The counterpoint is that fraud is rampant and cronyism is the order of the day. A lot of stuff that in DE/FR/IT would be pursued by law enforcement as corruption is just part and parcel of public life here in UK.
> Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany.
Controling said continent and ensuring policy is tilted in your favour tends to help. Bonus points if your resources are supplied by dictatorial regimes that start wars with or threaten your neighbours keeping them docile.
Productivity: GDP per hour worked, 2022, OECD.
Japan 53.2 USD
Germany 88 USD
Isn’t that heavily skewed by Japan’s culture of being in the office for obscenely long stretches? Not that they necessarily have to be productive, but the expectation is to be present.
And German office culture is even less presentee-ist than American. Unless you have a relatively high salary, you have a 35-40 hour contract full time, with a lot of us on part time contracts. Pre-Covid, we really were only around for those set hours, with a few flextime accumulated here and there, then burned off within the year. Even with home office, people still tend to stick to their contract hours.
Your employer would be a bit suspicious if you were routinely in the office or logged into the VPN longer than you were booking…
Yes. If they didn't have to spend every waking hour at work, things like raising a family would be conceivable. Everything is connected and that's part of the reason why Japan's population pyramid is a disaster.
Yes, though the yen being real weak also affects this.
In ten years it won’t matter. The top 3 in the world will be USA, China and India. Then it will become China, india and USA. Unless Germany and Japan change their birth rates they will start shrinking
https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/india-to-surpass-ge...
China's birth rate is much lower than the US, but both are below replacement. US is only slightly below. India is slightly above, but falling.
IMHO the countries to dominate the 21st century will be those that attract the largest number of high quality immigrants. Countries that do not will stagnate. Countries that drive quality people away (brain drain) will collapse.
The US has an huge advantage there unless we stupidly close our borders because of racism and fear.
China will fare poorly if rising authoritarianism and low birth rates lead to both declining population and population loss. Nobody migrates to authoritarian countries unless they have nowhere better to go and are fleeing something a lot worse.
Fun fact, for a brief moment Italy was the world's 4th largest economy (after USA, Japan and Germany) in the 1980s.
1987:
US $4,855B
Japan $2,532B
Germany $1,298B
Italy $805B
UK $745B
Why? What caused the boon at the time?
I mean it's still the 8th biggest economy in the world, so not exactly small. People always find this very surprising giving all the issues the country has but the north has many centuries of high-end manufacturing history. In particular very expensive, very specialised machines used in manufacturing of everything else.
The industrial sector was riding the long wave of public investment started with the Marshall Plan. The Socialist Party was brought into government in the early 1960s (to lock out the larger Communist Party), and ensured the robust program of public funding for industrial efforts (and civil servants) would continue and expand. This created a feedback loop whereby public debt would grow, forcing currency devaluation, which boosted exports, which made the system look so successful that further increasing public debt was seen as acceptable - and so on and so forth. In addition, a few underdeveloped regions exploited the deflated exchange rates to bootstrap cheap manufacturing, particularly in the North-East, right about that time.
The game came crashing down in the early '90s, when credit markets pulled the plug as the debt/gdp ratio hit triple digits and looked out of control. The only way to re-establish credibility was to dramatically cut spending and increase taxes (infamously, one year the government made an overnight withdrawal from all private bank accounts over a certain balance, completely unannounced!) and hook Italian fortunes to the European integration effort, piggybacking on the almighty Deutschemark. This stabilised things but effectively ended the boom times for good, since we cannot compete at the cheap end anymore.
Still, the country continues to be a solid G8 member and produces a lot of excellent fare - the world queues up to buy Italian brands, from automotive to food, and most of them are absolutely worth the money. Among other things, chances are that your sunglasses and eyeglasses are made in Italy, even if you don't know it.
really good pasta harvest
the fact that Japan has wallowed in the backwaters since the 1980s is endlessly fascinating to me. Can't think of another country that had so much potential just voluntarily squander it away because of.. bad culture?
While I am not an expert, the most common cited cause for the Japanese stagnation is the late '80s Japanese asset bubble, possibly worsened by the '85 Plaza Accords where US significantly devalued its currency USD, via currency market manipulation.
From a wider perspective, individuals and countries alike are subject to economic forces that sometimes are beyond their control. The American cultural habit of attributing, without rest, ill fate to moral failing, lacks in nuance. Possibly a byproduct of the historically unique wealth of opportunity bestowed onto the post-war generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
The asset bubble was a problem, but Japan has also suffered from excessive economic central planning leading to malinvestment. They squandered their resources by literally building bridges to nowhere. The book "Dogs & Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan" by Alex Kerr gives a thorough and balanced explanation of what happened.
Wallowed in backwaters is one way to put a nation with the second highest GDP in the world, extremely low poverty and crime, and rankings generally at the top of every measurable facet most care about including self reported quality of life.
This is more than a little rose-colored.
Japan does do very well on some metrics, but there's also ones where they do pretty badly. For example, they do badly on measures of gender equality IIRC.
As measured by their own self reported satisfaction with treatment of genders, or liberal western theories on what gender equality should look like? Would be curious to see the data there.
wallowed in the backwaters is a bit strong. it's still the world's 3rd/4th largest economy with the 12th largest population
yea i knkow... i struggled to describe the feelings i had about japan, this is the best i had lol. open to suggestions.
but primarily thinking of:
- nikkei/real estate not past its dotcom peak
- telecoms/internet infra generally 1 generation behind most other developed countries
- anecdotally seemingly very hostile/unstable politics especially to women and immigrants
- i vaguely remember some revisionist history around their ww2 atrocities?
IMO, the lower the real estate valuations, the better. Cheap real estate is one of the main points Japan has in its favor right now. Cheap transportation, cheap food, and cheap electricity all contribute to a healthy economy; cheap real estate is no different.
On the telecom side, as with so many others, Japan squandered their early lead by being extremely inward-focused, as usual. Despite their export-oriented economy and a few giants like Toyota and Sony, most Japanese companies are rarely interested in looking beyond their (shrinking) domestic market, resulting in "Galapagos syndrome", where diverse and sophisticated domestic technologies evolve in isolation from the rest of the world, only to eventually be crushed when global competitors catch up and subsequently pass them.
absolutely booming culturally though. food, tv, comic books, video games, trading cards all extremely popular the world over, which cannot be said for any other nation besides the US, which is almost 3x the size and hasn't earned that position on merit the same way Japan has
How about Rested on the laurels of its postwar boom?
Argentina?
Ukraine?
Belarus?
Brasil?
Russia?
Turkey?
The Balkans?
United Kingdom?
Being anti-immigration probably contributed a lot towards this.
Japan has a long term strategy and your country has a short term optimised strategy perhaps
Canada.
Canada’s situation is nothing like Japan’s.
Canada’s economy has tripled in size since 1995. Japan’s economy is smaller than it was in 1995.
When will California eclipse Japan then?
Germany broke $2 trillion GDP around 2002, so it took about 20 years to overcome Japan. California broke $2T GDP around 2011 so it'll probably take another decade for California to overcome Japan.
If the yen gets even weaker, it could happen real soon!
Germany is also allowing lots of immigration and this helps their economy by having an available workforce.
The citizens will have no claim on any national divident or claim of ownership. Whats the point if they have no borders and no country.