Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#81

Post by ginko » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #35

paganel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Malthus was in a sense right, as the “too many people” issue has showed up constantly since he wrote his stuff. And before anyone comes and tells me that “he was wrong because the Earth can sustain 8-9 billion humans, like it does right now”, I’ll say that there’s no way Earth’s actual ecosystem can sustain a major part of that population regularly eating beef, or regularly flying, or having scattered individual h…

You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human creativity. And also human capacity for accepting compromises. When Malthus lived, there were about 1 billion people. It's hard to estimate, but I'd guess at most 10% of those were living non-miserable lives, so about 100 million people at most. Now the world middle class is 4 billion (40x) and the world upper class is probably around half a billion people (5x). I'm willi…

> You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human creativity. And also human capacity for accepting compromises.

Sure we might manage to live with 10 billion people on the planet, maybe even more. But why would we want to? I see no value in having more people on the planet. If anything it only reduces the value of each individual.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#82

Post by mrob » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

gsk22 wrote: post #71

mrob wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese is second most complicated. Japanese has all the Chinese characters, and hiragana and katakana in addition.

This is not true at all. Japanese Kanji comprise only a few thousand characters (~2000 being considered sufficient for functional literacy). Chinese has well over 50000 characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

All Traditional Chinese characters are valid in Japanese even if they're only used for names. Japanese also has kanji invented in Japan which are not valid in Chinese. There are currently 2136 jōyō (general use) kanji, which are the bare minimum you need to known to be considered literate, but if that's all you know you're going to spend a lot of time with a dictionary. In practice you need at least 3000 characters, which is about the same as you need in Chinese.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#83

Post by contingencies » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:07 PM UTC

giantDinosaur wrote: post #74

contingencies wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan seemed to me a case study in hiding sociocultural problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition and specifically some sort of perverse derivative of Confucianism. Korea has the same problem. It's a dead-end culture: China and Vietnam finally threw off the shackles in the 20th century at great cost, but Northeast Asia's sociocultural and political economies are apparently still largely running…

I think you'll have to be a lot more concrete to make this claim particularly strong. What is a 'dead end' culture? How does that contrast with the problems in the West (and yes, especially those in the US)? How did China 'throw off' their shackles in a way different to Japan post WW2? What are the actual 5th century ideas in play?

Confucianism promotes a centralized and hierarchical sociopolitical system, fundamentally conservative in nature, and deeply misogynistic. Being therefore limited in its adaptive capacity, it is necessarily being phased out even in its homeland. I think you can educate yourself as to national histories in the 20th century. I am not going to get in to comparisons with the west.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#84

Post by gfxgirl » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #50

The American obsession over living or not with parents sounds almost pathological to me. Being jobless is issue. Long term inability to find partner is issue. But, if you don't have partner, what exactly is the reason for moving to live alone and why is focus specifically on "omg someone lives with parents"? I mean, multigenerational households were historical norm. It is not something super special that happened jus…

You need to help spread the idea that the reason people don't live with their parents is corporations brainwashed them into wanting to move out so they'd buy cars, rent apartments, and fill those apartments with things.

No idea if it's true

Of course corporations brainwashed us into believing smoking is cool and wedding rings are required and no amount of try to point that out as made a single % dent in getting people to stop wanting either.

Maybe sponsor a few movies a year showing happy families living under the same roof caring for each other.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#85

Post by brazzy » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

sprash wrote: post #40

brazzy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong because every person who supplies labor also generates demand for goods and services, which generates demand for labor. Simply "removing" unemployed people would not in fact fix the oversupply of labor. I also explained that the problem is not just that employers are picky because of an oversupply, they are picky in ways that are actually not really in their own interest and which contribute to the oversupply p…

Wrong. Additional demand beyond bare necessities is only generated if there is disposable income available which is not the case when there is a oversupply of labor driving down wages. If employers would act systematically against their own interest by hiring only young people it would be easy for investors to come in eliminate them in the market. But they won't because they can't. Employers prefer young people becau…

Oh boy. The bare necessities of someone is already "additional demand" over that person not being present. Disposable income is a completely irrelevant factor here. In fact, disposable income is the part that doesn't generate the same level of economic demand because it can be saved rather than spent.

And no, it is not easy for investors to outcompete incumbents simply by being more efficient with their employment policies, especially not in a society like Japan. And my point is that employers are not hiring older people even though they could pay them less.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#86

Post by jhanschoo » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #38

asutekku wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lived in japan and believe me, what you see as a tourist does not translate into reality. Japan in general is about 10 years behind the western world and in some places even more. Sure, tourist facing areas and central tokyo are pretty nice, but that’s not the reality in most places.

What does it mean to be "10 years behind the western world" ? Are they behind in technology, values, policy? Can you give some examples? I'm not disagreeing with you, just curious for more info. (I don't know much about Japan myself.)

A partial answer: Googling 'japan fax' would give you many articles attesting that faxes are still a stable for communication in offices.

e.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja...

> Japan’s health ministry has said it will allow health centres to report new coronavirus cases online, instead of by handwritten faxes, after a doctor lambasted the legal requirement.

Another very externally visible example is that the Japanese have taken a long time to transition from SHIFT_JIS to Unicode on the web, and on Windows.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#87

Post by Balgair » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

growlist wrote: post #28

pmlnr wrote: post #4

Japan has the problems now we, Western society will be facing in 20 years. This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it.

I don't understand why Western countries are not incentivising people to have children.

Where I am in the US the average cost of first birth without c-section is ~$8k to the patient. With c-section it's ~$20k to the patient. ~30% of all births where I am are c-sections. These prices do not include any other treatment to the mother or child, only the delivery fee. I assume these prices include medicaid/VA patients as well, but I cannot confirm. Likely that means people not under government insurance are paying more than what I stated, but I'd go with those numbers with a gun to my head.

So, the simple act of having children in my part of the US is quite expensive.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#88

Post by roenxi » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #70

roenxi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the argument there, that I can't point to Japan as an example of Malthusianism because you don't believe in Malthusianism? There is a physical limit somewhere. Just because we didn't find it in the last hundred years doesn't mean we won't in the future. Real growth in % terms eventually stops because it hits a physical limit; that isn't a controversial idea. It is almost too obvious to state. Humanity can't m…

Yes (and you can take that argument to deliciously absurd levels by pointing out that eventually humanity would have to form a sphere whose radius expands faster than light speed). But concerning the actual topic at hand, Japan's labor market problems have nothing whatsoever to do with a resource or land shortage.

They probably have something to do with that. At the moment, for Japan has a tiny handful of iron mines [0]. So if they want to produce a steel widget, they have to justify someone transporting the iron either through the Chinese mainland or up the coast, past a lot of people who are learning to do wonderful things with steel. They import a lot of coal from Australia but China has relatively easy access overland from provinces like Inner Mongolia.

I'm not sure how much of an advantage they gain from having very easy port access by virtue of being an island (probably quite a big one, I assume). But it is hard to accept they wouldn't be having a much easier time if they had easy access to something like the Saudi oil fields, the US oil fields, the Chinese coal fields, etc etc. They are a long way away from the good sources of natural resources.

And they struggle to be self sufficient in food in the first result I found [1]. That is pretty different from somewhere like the US. There is a real risk of war in East Asia, so I imagine they'd be quite uncomfortable with that.

They have completely different resource-use problems than the economies that are larger than they are. The idea that the US would have to exert itself to be self sufficient in food is rather weird, as is the idea that China would struggle to justify transporting resources to the country from Mongolia, etc. It is obvious to me what could be done with more people in the US or China. In Japan there is probably something, but it does require actual ability to find instead of just "dig more, grow more, build more, forge more" that their competitors for the best-economy crown can manage.

Japan needs transformative technological improvements to grow. The US needs warm bodies. China needed to stop the Great Leap Forward and put competent leaders in charge. The Japanese challenge is much greater.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mines_in_Japan

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture,_forestry,_and_fis...

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#89

Post by latch » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

gfxgirl wrote: post #73

latch wrote: post #12

I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future [compared to anywhere else I've been]. Yet there seems to be a fairly constant negative economic narrative about Japan (and this narrative seems to be decades old). What's the deal? Are my observations superficial, or are economists just annoyed that Japan doesn't fit their world-view (low…

What about Japan seems like the future? Maybe you should try Singapore or many of the big cities in China. Singapore's architecture looks far more in the future than anything in Japan at this point. So do many other more modern Asian cities. China has lots of poverty but the big cities are far further along in their switch to digital than Japan. It was a big deal during lockdown that so much of Japan's government run…

I've lived for multiple years in Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong. I think they're all great.

For the sake of argument, I'll try to keep this about Tokyo, but a key observation of mine is that _all_ of Japan is like this.

Objectively, Tokyo has the lowest pollution. Singapore is close, on average, but it can have awful week-long spikes. Tokyo has the lowest crime rate. Again, Singapore is basically the same, but it does have a high incarceration rate. Japan has the lowest income inequality gap (couldn't find Tokyo-specific statistics). Japan has the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality rate (tied with Singapore re infant mortality). Japan also has the highest rate of people who completed tertiary education.

Pollution and income inequality are, for me, major indicators. Income equality benefits everyone; and, as much as I love Singapore (I really do), it's hard for me to consider it an ideal future city because of this (and the inequality has a racial aspect which, I think, is the source of its persistence).

The lockdown highlighted the worst in every country. Both China and Singapore had clear failings (and successes).

I guess we're measuring "future" differently. Technology vs [e]quality of life.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#90

Post by latch » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #47

latch wrote: post #12

I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future [compared to anywhere else I've been]. Yet there seems to be a fairly constant negative economic narrative about Japan (and this narrative seems to be decades old). What's the deal? Are my observations superficial, or are economists just annoyed that Japan doesn't fit their world-view (low…

> I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future [compared to anywhere else I've been]. Have you been to Singapore?

Yes, lived there for 4 years.