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Why Japanese companies do so many different things

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Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#131

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Aunche wrote: post #92
marcosdumay wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Marx theories do not hold up to reality, and most people can plainly see it. How is it working for the US to have every company mostly owned by the general public's retirement funds?

> Because Marx theories do not hold up to reality Sure, but ownership being the root of inequality was the one thing that he was actually correct about. CEO to worker pay ratio is something that is completely irrelevant. Companies spend orders of magnitude more money on its shareholders (dividends, buybacks, and reinvestment) than executive compensation.

Global societies were still mostly agrarian in his time. His analysis doesn't work well for the modern era with <5% engaged in farming. Central planning won't work. You need distributed decision making to be flexible for changing circumstances. You need capital for industrialization and you need a cadre of people who can take risks to invest surplus capital into new ventures. The large disparity in wealth is a problem, but some is necessary.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#132

Post by kibwen »

busterarm wrote: post #55
jdw64 wrote: post #7

It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…

[flagged]

Unions are a poor solution to a worse problem. It's like if your roof was sagging, so you propped it up with a rotten log. You might be tempted to remove the rotten log, but that just means your roof caves in. Unions exist to antagonize company owners to keep them from indulging in their worst excesses when it comes to abusing their employees. Removing the union just means unleashing that unchecked power. A better solution isn't to disparage unions, it's to champion corporate structures that grant direct ownership to their employees, to move away from the outdated feudalist structure and towards a democratic structure. This makes unions obsolete.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#133

Post by layer8 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #109
layer8 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk-free interest rate is a pretty low floor for returns though? At least in my experience with expectations of what counts as a profitable project.

The risk-free floor is around 4% these days. Because the return on any other use of capital must be risk-adjusted, the breakeven might be 6-7%. That is roughly a 3x higher rate of return than you needed to breakeven when the risk-free rate was ~0%. Small absolute changes in risk-free interest rates cause many things to become unprofitable when the relative change in interest rates is large. A risk-free rate of 1.0% a…

Yeah, but my experience with what is considered a profitable project is firmly in the two-digits percentage range. Anything single-digit would count as a fairly low floor.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#134

Post by kibwen »

qurren wrote: post #81
jdw64 wrote: post #7

It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…

> how Westerners idealize Japan Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. They present cherry-picked aspects of both countries that make China look bad and Japan look good. In reality every country has its good and bad aspects. This is just part of the propaganda machine and what politicians want you to believe, in an effort to align their populations to be s…

> Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere.

As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself via the media it exports, whereas China is just comparatively terrible at exercising this sort of soft power.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#135

Post by sofixa »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #88
ryukoposting wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll preface this by saying there are lots of other factors at play, but here's an interesting one I can speak to personally: Car culture. We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now. Even most Baby Boomers are too young to remember a world without Honda or Toyota. Across all age groups, a lot more Americans grew up with a fondne…

> We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now. I assume "we" are Americans. I keep writing this over and over again on HN: There are NO highly developed non-micro states that are not car centric outside of major cities. Yes, literally, Japan, outside of a few large cities, is incredibly car centric. Sure, the cars are small and c…

> There are NO highly developed non-micro states that are not car centric outside of major cities.

That's an argument. Lack of density means that public transportation is hard to have enough scale. But the US is uniquely bad at both density but also lack of transportation options. In countries like the UK and France (just because I'm familiar with them, I'm not claiming they're the only ones or it's something unique to them) even small towns have a regular bus or train connection to elsewhere. Might not be the best frequency, but it's there. In the US even multi hundred thousand people cities have literally nothing other than cars as an option.

So there are layers of car centricity. And considering most people live in cities, in countries like most of the developed world, the majority of the population has the option of at least decent transit. You know which countries are the exception.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#136

Post by ozim »

jdw64 wrote: post #7

It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…

I think you need to step back and look at why those people write such things.

There are people who romanticize Japan/Asia because they never were there and it is not attainable for them.

There are people who romanticize Japan/Asia because they have direct business interests to do so like selling dreams to the first group.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#138

Post by jandrewrogers »

layer8 wrote: post #133
jandrewrogers wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk-free floor is around 4% these days. Because the return on any other use of capital must be risk-adjusted, the breakeven might be 6-7%. That is roughly a 3x higher rate of return than you needed to breakeven when the risk-free rate was ~0%. Small absolute changes in risk-free interest rates cause many things to become unprofitable when the relative change in interest rates is large. A risk-free rate of 1.0% a…

Yeah, but my experience with what is considered a profitable project is firmly in the two-digits percentage range. Anything single-digit would count as a fairly low floor.

A lot of it depends on the risk. For something that has a profile more like venture you might need a 15-20% return. There are also fixed overheads so you also need an element of scale.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#139

Post by ux266478 »

user____name wrote: post #113
qurren wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how Westerners idealize Japan Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. They present cherry-picked aspects of both countries that make China look bad and Japan look good. In reality every country has its good and bad aspects. This is just part of the propaganda machine and what politicians want you to believe, in an effort to align their populations to be s…

Is it propaganda though? Japan is more aligned with ‘the west’ not only in geopolitics but in the system of governance that was imposed upon it by via USA occuptation. Whereas China has a very different political system that is generally poorly understood and distrusted. Regardless, I don’t know where you’re from, but I see plenty of idolizing of China and how it manages to solve big problems at speeds unseen outside…

> but I see plenty of idolizing of China and how it manages to solve big problems at speeds unseen

This is actually a great example for extant romanticization of China. People lauding Chinese expediency in the context of industry and construction often don't realize it's almost entirely enabled by extreme underregulation and underenforcement of industrial safety standards. Chinese people themselves will often point this out, though depending on the person they may frame it more in a style of "The West is slow because of all of the red tape!"

Of the subset of Westerners who are aware of this, sometimes I have to balk at how many of them will take that framing to heart and paint it as a positive thing. Even most Chinese don't have a positive view of it, not in reality. At most it's a tragic necessity required to build China up, though younger Chinese rightly tend to see it for what it is: corporate exploitation of laborers.

Of course in the context of solving political problems, the Politburo readily cutting through its own invented problems is another matter.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#140

Post by LZ_Khan »

jdw64 wrote: post #7

It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…

Yes, objectively these characteristics of Japanese corporations seem like inefficiencies in the "free market".

Lack of mobility across companies (no price discovery on wages), lack of specialization (no focus), age based hierarchy (anti-meritocratic). None of these sound good for a well-tuned system.

I suspect much of Japan's stagnation is due to this system.

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