Japanese carmakers are going to become irrelevant [1] unless there's a major change. But that's very unlikely due to: 1. Supply chains and key raw materials mostly controlled by China 2. Japan's demographic collapse 3. Japanese Gen Z fed up with an unwinnable rat race where they live to just pay rent and groceries It's very sad. [1] https://carnewschina.com/2025/01/13/byd-surpass-toyota-in-ja...
There's one graph that basically predicts which countries are going to fail and which are going to prevail. It's the graph that shows how many people in the "doing things" age bracket a country has. Compare these: (germany) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=276&type=Probabilis... (alternatively, Europe as a whole) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=908&type=Probabilis... (Japan) https://population.un.org…
Europe has largely converged on American growth, the East in particular continues to grow fast. But more important is that this is obviously an intentionally selective group of countries. Add Taiwan or South Korea to this story and it becomes a lot more complicated, because the latter is about to/has overtaken Japan on a per capita basis while having some of the worst demographics on the planet.
There's research by Keyu Jin that actually shows the opposite, globally growth after the year 2000 has been faster in aging countries for the simple reason that it increases returns on labor saving technology, i.e. automation (telling image:https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/13645.jpeg) and that is, even if you are conservative on technological developments in the next few decades, likely to accelerate quickly.
