Bryan, which of the following is your position regarding open borders in Japan?
A) Japan should not open its borders.
B) Japan should open its borders, and doing so would make the lives of average Japanese people better.
C) Japan should open its borders. Doing so would make the lives of average Japanese people worse, but they need to suck it up for the greater good of the third world.
The externalities of a having superior genetics are massive.
The Japanese are also noted as having fairly low housing cost relative to their very low amount of land, and their more YIMBY building policy. I think that the fact that there are so few anti-social elements to society makes this a lot easier. Who cares about the new neighbors when you know they are going to be well behaved fellow ethnics.
I hope they do not follow your immigration advice and fuck it all up. Cheap foreign workers are never actually cheap, you pay for it in other ways.
How were COVID enforcement in schools or workplaces? Being able to go without a mask when you were outdoors or a restaurant patron vs restaurant worker was already the case in the US for most of the pandemic. I understand that you didn't send your kid to public school there so maybe there just wasn't a way to observe. Online it claims they are required to indoors, but don't have to outdoors (though teachers are having a hard time getting kids to take their masks off outside, even in extreme heat). School COVID policy was really the COVID policy that was most impactful.
During COVID in the USA I found Asians to be the most tight ass enforcers of COVID policy. They are still visibly the most likely to still be wearing masks.
I think that Asians are genuinely perplexed when social pressure doesn't work to bring compliance, because it essentially always works in those cultures. I wonder if, paradoxically, enforcement would be stronger if more people didn't comply.
It seems like Japan benefits a whole lot from a culture that is very high in conscientiousness. If Japan were to adopt open borders and accept large numbers of immigrants, do you expect that the culture would not be effected negatively, or that the positive economic effects would more than make up for the negative cultural effects? Or is Japan a special case where open borders would be a net nagative?
I’ve been to Japan. It’s a fascinating country to visit. Especially as a tall red-head. I’ve recently moved from an urban area to a very rural farming community, and as I was reading this, I was thinking in many of the points, one could replace Japan/Japanese with “rural farming community/country people”.
My impression is that most of those problems USED to be major problems, but they got better. Long working hours, cramped living space, high social pressure and suicide, etc... everyone knew that these were big social problems, especially in the 80s and 90s. But things got better. They built more housing, and a new generation of workers entered that was less gung-ho about working themselves to the point of suicide. They're no longer having the ridiculous growth that they did in the 80s, but they're not stagnating either.
One thing- I can't help but feel like most Japanese websites are really outdated and kind of ugly-looking. I'm not sure how you measure that as an economic problem, though. Must be hard to do programming with Kanji.
"Excellent customer service seems closely tied to pride in one’s work, which in turn is closely tied to job satisfaction." I think this is a undervalued aspect of Japanese society. The fact that even the person who cleans the toilets in the subway station takes pride in their work and is shown respect from people from all other walks of life creates huge amounts of free happiness and free well-being. So many people in the US in low status (or even just not-high) jobs feel undervalued, which causes them to be unhappy. (And believe me, the public toilets in Japan are SPOTLESS).
"And I bet that the quality of their residences is markedly superior to Europe’s, where “historic” and “run-down” go hand-in-hand."
My experience is that, compared to Scandinavia (with a similar climate), heat isolation is absolutely terrible in Japan. This is also true for sound isolation.
"Service quality is almost always notably higher than in the U.S. "
I disagree. It's true the superficial service in a Japanese store is noticeably superb, but consumers mostly care about service when things are off. Two common scenarios are returning items and asking for advice when you are not sure what to get, or where to get it. In the US, if you mistakenly buy a 40w bulb when you really wanted a 60w one, you can take it home, out of the box, install it in your lamp and turn the lamp on. After seeing you are not getting the light you expected, you can almost certainly get a refund or exchange credit by the hardware store by bringing it back. This is true almost nowhere else in the world. I haven't exchanged that many items in Japan, but the few experiences I have had were nothing close to the experience in the US, where the attitude is generally that I have a right to exchange it and the store needs a really good reason to not take the item back.
In American stores, if I ask for something they don't have, they will often direct me to another place to look. Several times I've even had them call ahead to the other store to check for me. In Japan, this has not happened to me once. Common cases is asking for English books in a book-store and asking for rooms in a hotel if you don't know if it's full. In these cases, I typically get a curt response and no additional help.
> My last hotel only had a single escalator, which went up during check-in hours and down during check-out hours.
Im unsure if this contradicts metaphysics or physics, but then it could do each way only once, requiring a lot of stair walking. Perhaps, however, you omitted the possibility that it only accepted passengers up OR down depending on time.
Back when I was an undergrad, a professor said Japan's housing problems would be solved if they adopted free trade re: rice, and then didn't have to use so much land to grow rice there. Do you have any sense this is the case?
During labor shortages, employers are given greater incentive to go through the effort of finding the diamonds in the rough rather than increasing salaries; immigration actually fuels this sheepskin effect by making the degree premium more affordable for employers. https://apnews.com/article/cb2739df66fea98e4e017f25e114dfb6
The effect of immigration is to make wages cheap enough that employers would rather save on testing materials and rely more on university degrees rather than raising wages or finding the diamonds in the rough.
When there, did you wear a mask? (when not taking pictures?)
My understanding based on what I'd heard was that masking was socially expected nearly everywhere/all the time, which was the big thing making me not want to visit.
I was in Japan for a brief time and it seemed to me that they pad the stats a bit. It's true that everyone is employed, but many in fruitless and even nonsensical jobs. Five parking assistants in every grocer. Am I overstating this? Anyone?
Bryan, which of the following is your position regarding open borders in Japan?
A) Japan should not open its borders.
B) Japan should open its borders, and doing so would make the lives of average Japanese people better.
C) Japan should open its borders. Doing so would make the lives of average Japanese people worse, but they need to suck it up for the greater good of the third world.
That would all match my experience.
The externalities of a having superior genetics are massive.
The Japanese are also noted as having fairly low housing cost relative to their very low amount of land, and their more YIMBY building policy. I think that the fact that there are so few anti-social elements to society makes this a lot easier. Who cares about the new neighbors when you know they are going to be well behaved fellow ethnics.
I hope they do not follow your immigration advice and fuck it all up. Cheap foreign workers are never actually cheap, you pay for it in other ways.
How were COVID enforcement in schools or workplaces? Being able to go without a mask when you were outdoors or a restaurant patron vs restaurant worker was already the case in the US for most of the pandemic. I understand that you didn't send your kid to public school there so maybe there just wasn't a way to observe. Online it claims they are required to indoors, but don't have to outdoors (though teachers are having a hard time getting kids to take their masks off outside, even in extreme heat). School COVID policy was really the COVID policy that was most impactful.
During COVID in the USA I found Asians to be the most tight ass enforcers of COVID policy. They are still visibly the most likely to still be wearing masks.
I think that Asians are genuinely perplexed when social pressure doesn't work to bring compliance, because it essentially always works in those cultures. I wonder if, paradoxically, enforcement would be stronger if more people didn't comply.
It seems like Japan benefits a whole lot from a culture that is very high in conscientiousness. If Japan were to adopt open borders and accept large numbers of immigrants, do you expect that the culture would not be effected negatively, or that the positive economic effects would more than make up for the negative cultural effects? Or is Japan a special case where open borders would be a net nagative?
I’ve been to Japan. It’s a fascinating country to visit. Especially as a tall red-head. I’ve recently moved from an urban area to a very rural farming community, and as I was reading this, I was thinking in many of the points, one could replace Japan/Japanese with “rural farming community/country people”.
My impression is that most of those problems USED to be major problems, but they got better. Long working hours, cramped living space, high social pressure and suicide, etc... everyone knew that these were big social problems, especially in the 80s and 90s. But things got better. They built more housing, and a new generation of workers entered that was less gung-ho about working themselves to the point of suicide. They're no longer having the ridiculous growth that they did in the 80s, but they're not stagnating either.
One thing- I can't help but feel like most Japanese websites are really outdated and kind of ugly-looking. I'm not sure how you measure that as an economic problem, though. Must be hard to do programming with Kanji.
"Excellent customer service seems closely tied to pride in one’s work, which in turn is closely tied to job satisfaction." I think this is a undervalued aspect of Japanese society. The fact that even the person who cleans the toilets in the subway station takes pride in their work and is shown respect from people from all other walks of life creates huge amounts of free happiness and free well-being. So many people in the US in low status (or even just not-high) jobs feel undervalued, which causes them to be unhappy. (And believe me, the public toilets in Japan are SPOTLESS).
"And I bet that the quality of their residences is markedly superior to Europe’s, where “historic” and “run-down” go hand-in-hand."
My experience is that, compared to Scandinavia (with a similar climate), heat isolation is absolutely terrible in Japan. This is also true for sound isolation.
"Service quality is almost always notably higher than in the U.S. "
I disagree. It's true the superficial service in a Japanese store is noticeably superb, but consumers mostly care about service when things are off. Two common scenarios are returning items and asking for advice when you are not sure what to get, or where to get it. In the US, if you mistakenly buy a 40w bulb when you really wanted a 60w one, you can take it home, out of the box, install it in your lamp and turn the lamp on. After seeing you are not getting the light you expected, you can almost certainly get a refund or exchange credit by the hardware store by bringing it back. This is true almost nowhere else in the world. I haven't exchanged that many items in Japan, but the few experiences I have had were nothing close to the experience in the US, where the attitude is generally that I have a right to exchange it and the store needs a really good reason to not take the item back.
In American stores, if I ask for something they don't have, they will often direct me to another place to look. Several times I've even had them call ahead to the other store to check for me. In Japan, this has not happened to me once. Common cases is asking for English books in a book-store and asking for rooms in a hotel if you don't know if it's full. In these cases, I typically get a curt response and no additional help.
> My last hotel only had a single escalator, which went up during check-in hours and down during check-out hours.
Im unsure if this contradicts metaphysics or physics, but then it could do each way only once, requiring a lot of stair walking. Perhaps, however, you omitted the possibility that it only accepted passengers up OR down depending on time.
Interesting. I wonder how much their homogenous culture and immigration policies influence their quality of life, and if they are inextricably linked?
This is very interesting., TY!
Back when I was an undergrad, a professor said Japan's housing problems would be solved if they adopted free trade re: rice, and then didn't have to use so much land to grow rice there. Do you have any sense this is the case?
Fascinating and enjoyable information!
Hey Caplan, guess what?
During labor shortages, employers are given greater incentive to go through the effort of finding the diamonds in the rough rather than increasing salaries; immigration actually fuels this sheepskin effect by making the degree premium more affordable for employers. https://apnews.com/article/cb2739df66fea98e4e017f25e114dfb6
The effect of immigration is to make wages cheap enough that employers would rather save on testing materials and rely more on university degrees rather than raising wages or finding the diamonds in the rough.
I would pay $10k per year for Tokyo levels of crime in my city!
When there, did you wear a mask? (when not taking pictures?)
My understanding based on what I'd heard was that masking was socially expected nearly everywhere/all the time, which was the big thing making me not want to visit.
I was in Japan for a brief time and it seemed to me that they pad the stats a bit. It's true that everyone is employed, but many in fruitless and even nonsensical jobs. Five parking assistants in every grocer. Am I overstating this? Anyone?