My takeaway from this article is that Bryan Caplan’s brain should be preserved and studied after his (natural) death. The very idea that someone could look at Japan and come away with the notion that the thing that would improve it is millions of unskilled immigrants from the Third World is truly mind boggling and supports the notion that too much time studying the spherical cows of the economics world can derange a man.
If this article made sense to you, I suspect your head lacks substance. One shouldn’t need a study on the effects of incineration to not set oneself on fire.
Yes, letting more people cross government borders to get jobs and houses is like setting your hair on fire. We should deport everyone I don’t like to make sure we’re not lighting our hair on fire with anyone here. We shouldn’t think about it and just keep using crazy analogies.
And yet, Japan has had stagnate per capita income/GDP gains despite an incredibly hard-working and detail-oriented workforce. Yes, you're not Japanese so you probably don't care that the median Japanese isn't as rich as the median American, but the exchange for (on average) shockingly terrific service in Japan at MickeyD's (and other service-oriented places; and mind you, I and my Japanese wife truly enjoy it too) compared to the US is that Japanese-Japanese on average just aren't as rich as their (genetically identical) Japanese-American peers.
Do you believe that Japan would be richer if it had a brown underclass?
Do you believe that having to lock up everything at the convenience store to prevent shoplifting and then hire people to unlock the items on request would make Japan rich?
Why hasn't importing brown people made other countries as rich as the USA? Europe imported a lot of Muslims and it doesn't seem to have made them richer.
Canada and the UK imported a lot of "skilled" Indian immigrants and they've been in decade long per capita recessions.
If I had to guess why Japan is poorer then America I would posit the following:
1) Japan is dramatically less resource poor. It has very little land and natural resources, which has an impact. It's possible to specialize a small portion of your country around that, Tokyo's financial area has a GDP per capita as high as any global city, but not an entire country of 125M. Just what do you think people in these villages in these rural prefectures are going to do? If it was North Dakota they might drill for energy, in Japan not much.
2) I think it's fair at this point to question whether East Asians really are conformist and uncreative relative to their IQ. Every single East Asian country reaches some "catch up" point running the same export oriented growth model (i.e. we tell them to build things that already exist which we want and they do so efficiently with some tweaks). Then it completely stalls. People spend all day doing Red Queen race nonsense.
If you told me there were over a billion people with an average IQ of 105 I would expect way higher output per capita of frontier accomplishment, but it's just not there. They do OK, and their comfortable but mediocre GDP/capita is a reflection of that.
3) The USA seems to have been uniquely successful in developing its tech sector and that drives a lot of its performance. Combined with its vast natural resources and geopolitical advantages and it's unique. Can we really expect Japan to do as well?
Anyway, it's hard to believe that America's secret sauce is having a brown underclass. Our high GDP isn't because people negroes are shooting each other in Detroit or Baltimore. It's being generated by the areas with the fewest of these people. And the #1 problem everyone in those areas complains about is that housing is mega expensive because that's the only way to defacto segregate away from the brown underclass.
I predict that if Bryan got his way Japan would not see any improvement in GDP/capita but it would experience all the joys of having a hostile underclass.
Black Americans contribute lot. Blues, jazz, rock and roll,rap, hip hop are all invented by black americans. The liks of.LeBron James me watching sport more interesting and enjoyable.
2. Canada kept up with the US in per capita GDP until 2015. I really doubt the inflection in 2015 is due to immigration policy as their immigration policy hasn't changed.
3. Browning France has been growing per capita GDP pretty well, thank you very much.
4. The big spurt in US growth (from Big Tech, pretty much exclusively) is driven heavily by immigrants.
“Between 2013 and 2023, Indians immigrating to Canada rose from 32,828 to 139,715, an increase of 326%,” according to the NFAP analysis.
Indian enrollment at Canadian universities rose more than 5,800% in the last two decades, from 2,181 in 2000 to 128,928 in 2021, an increase of 126,747 students.
Between 2016 and 2019, Indian international students enrolled in U.S. universities dropped by 13% but increased by 182% at Canadian universities. Diplomatic issues between India and Canada have reduced Indian student visa approvals in the short term.
-------
Indian immigration exploded around the time that Canadian GDP growth stalled.
----
France has the same GDP per capita today as it had in 2010.
----
4. The big spurt in US growth (from Big Tech, pretty much exclusively) is driven heavily by immigrants.
----
Big tech was founded pretty much exclusively by people of European descent.
Indians add virtually nothing to frontier development, though they do a great job of trying to capture secure revenue streams via nepotism and rule breaking. Hence why their own country is such a hell hole.
The UAE have mechanism that make this possible. Islam and honour culture means foreigners don't harass the native women or try to intermarry. Strict laws and a ethnic hierarchy mean that foreigners know their place. This would be difficult for softer societies to emulate. Japan, though not as soft as Europe, would probably have to endure a lot of sexual harassment, illegal immigrants, petty crime, litter etc just like Europe
Indians are perfectly fine immigrants, but they do not have quite as disciplined, honest and civil culture as the Japanese, who does?
Indians would likely also likely not being doing the low skilled roles after a couple generations as caplan is alluding too as they are a probably a reasonably high IQ population at least that is my impression from living in the UK. So what is the point in this?
All Japan would get with Indian immigration is a slightly larger population, probably slightly lower civil trust and slightly more corruption and litter. Indians might also be successful in some zero sum ways, they have more verbal IQ on the high end and might be more likely to end up as CEOs though it's unlikely they would add more value.
Japan builds housing because everyone is Japanese and therefore there is no reason to use housing as a form of segregation. They can achieve high levels of density due to social trust and the low rate of population increase keeps demand low.
If they import foreigners the housing situation would not only become worse because the existing capital stock would be diluted, but also they would have to start pricing a segregation premium into housing.
For a tiny country in which only 29% of its land is habitable this would be a disaster.
Even with a brutal climate, a religion-not-perfectly-designed-for-post-industrial-societies ;) and a culture ... well, I worked there some years ... - check their TIMMS-results, too. Even with all that, life for them* is paradise there. Because of borders open for workers. * and for the others it is good enough to come there, often even to pay agencies to get work there, and as for millions of tourists: revealed preferences.
Bryan is Jewish. It's not malicious, but Jews have a tendency to follow spherical cow economic/political arguments off of cliffs (see: communism, "anarchocapitalism", etc.) I am glad he is not in a policymaking position in Japan.
A 5 y.o. in Japan goes alone to her school, crosses streets, and takes buses. In Japan, there is almost no crime, and street drugs are unknown. There is no ethnic vote, and no George Floyd Remembrance Day. Why should they ruin their society?
The difference between the West and other countries is that other countries make it almost impossible for immigrants to get citizenship. There won’t be any “ethnic vote” or other patronage if such immigrants were simply not allowed to be citizens.
I have had two one-month vacations in Japan, once traveling by train, once by bicycle. Loved every minute of them. By the third week I was getting a good enough accent that they thought I understood their customs better than I did. By the end a week later, I was ready to come home.
I do not think I would enjoy living in Japan. The culture is too fixated on doing things the Japanese way. The tall nail gets hammered down.
And I could not imagine bringing up kids in that culture.
I didn't say anyone was inviting me to move to Japan. I made that up all by my lonesome as my contribution to Peter's discussion. If you feel like butting in, please butt in to your own conversation.
This post would be more persuasive if it included evidence that lower-skilled Japanese workers actually desire to be a manager of Africans or Pakistanis over the status quo.
I think the argument is that there is a social benefit to immigration. Namely, Japanese people become more productive, and produce more for all of humanity.
What individual Japanese people think about this doesn’t seem relevant, as that’s a personal cost, not a social one.
(Not that there aren’t social costs to immigration. I tend to agree with you, that the social costs are larger than what Bryan may think).
In theory, there is also the other option: high-skilled or mid-skilled and disciplined Japanese people stuck in a menial job could emigrate where there is a dearth of such people. For example, I have a large retail company in Central America (600 stores) and I would love to recruit tens of them to be store managers, district managers or even country managers. Of course, the big barriers are the language and I guess the Japanese culture. But this should not be a significant barrier for, say, an Italian or a French. Still, in 30 years in the business I could attract only a handful of these guys. I really don’t know why. They can easily make 4X or 5X what they make in their countries, but they prefer to be stuck in an end-job at 1500 euros per month in their country. Maybe lack of ambition coupled with the extensive welfare, who knows.
This is an interesting thought, but if Japan is brimming with smart, educated people, shouldn't the cream of the crop be able to generate better than a 1% growth rate? Why aren't the smart capable people able to create thier own businesses? I don't understand how "not enough immigrants" can explain this, unless the argument is that the street sweepers get paid too much and losing thier jobs to people who will work for less will encourage them to get a better job, which will then somehow materialize for them. I think there's a lot more to this than immigration, this seems a very weak argument. I know you linked to a paper explaining this in more detail, but you are generally able to save your readers the trouble by making clear common sense arguments so i for one would be interested if you could do that for this, since right now im not buying it :)
I find myself very sympathetic with your points. It seems like Japan is the way it is primarily because of culture, not other aspects. I am not sure that changing much of their culture would make things better reliably, and I don’t see how one brings in lots of immigrants without changing culture.
What about another idea instead of permanently transforming Japan: turn everyone into Japanese people. Making people in low-skill jobs smarter is good.
Even if you don't assume genetic difference they have a Confucian-derived culture and a large degree of conformity and stability at least in part due to the lack of ethnic divisions. That's really hard to copy elsewhere--South Korea and Taiwan are similar but have similar advantages. The Chinese will probably get there eventually but it takes a while to transform a nation of over a billion.
How many people do you know in the trades? Those aren't exactly easy jobs and unlike desk jobs, does physically break down your body in your old age. Also, what percentage of college grads did you imagine major in "intersectionality studies"?
I should also note that I know a good number of people in the trades, many of rather advanced age. Some trades are really rough, but most are not, and office work isn’t exactly great for you either. More importantly, most fairly smart tradesmen are running their own company by the time they get old enough to not want to do the work.
According to NCES, in 2022 151,109 bachelor’s degrees were given for “Social Sciences and History.” Much fewer than business and health fields, much more than biomed, engineering and psychology.
So, a fair few of the “What is even this major? What job are you learning?” Type degrees.
Well, I am fairly well versed in what economics is for, although I would note it often falls under the heading of Business, and the NCES report is not terribly specific about how it categorizes anything.
Poli Sci and History... I do think a lot of those students have not given sufficient thought as to how they are going to use their degrees. Most won't use it in their chosen field.
Now that I am home, I found this better chart on he NCES site https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_318.20.asp "Humanities" seems to be a different category, strangely missing from the previous chart I was looking at, with 252,324 bachelors in 2022. That suggests that it is a different category than the Poli Sci and History, which is its own category, and puts it in third place with 12% of graduates, behind business and health fields. So, quite a few of those majors.
I think the Japanese have looked at our ethnic conflicts and insane politics and decided they're going to keep doing their own thing where their products are the envy of the world, their culture is endlessly copied, and five-year-olds can walk to school by themselves.
I grew up doing quite a bit of hard labor on a ranch. This paved the way for becoming a skilled craftsman and home builder. I paid for two advanced degrees using these skills which meant that I graduated almost debt free. I modeled this kind of diverse work experience to my children. Learning how to work with your body and mind in tandem definitely increased my options for making a reasonable living (though not always easy) for myself and my family. In short, this kind of range ('Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a specialized World by David Epstein') served me well---secured and increased the overall quality of life for me and my family. Those early unskilled labor experiences encouraged me to work hard towards developing more advanced trade skills. Consequently, I have never been unemployed for more than a week or two. My appreciation and respect for "low on the totem pole" service workers like maids, janitors and dishwashers does not skate across the surface of things. Rather, it is hard won and authentic. Ironically, what I am saying here fits with much of what Bryan Caplan wrote in his 2018 book 'The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money'.
"they too feel on a gut level that it’s really bad to end up as a janitor if you have the talent to be an engineer."
I'd like to see the stats on this. How many Japanese janitors have the talent to be an engineer (age adjusted, etc.)?
"The Japanese speak very politely to janitors"
If the janitor were less likely to be massively overqualified, would they be spoken to in a less polite manor? I'm starting to get a Star Trek vibe here. We never see the servers in 10 Forward berated for bad service. They do roll their eyes at annoying impertinent barbers though, but just behind his back.
> But the bonanza is emphatically not just money. Being massively overqualified for your job doesn’t merely make you poor. Being massively overqualified for your job is soul-crushing. And for all its touristic wonders, low-immigration Japan is the heart of soul-crushing overqualification on Earth.
Is Japan more soul-crushed than other countries? That doesn't seem to fit your observation of Japanese workers.
That is an insane article, super shallow and absolutely filled with half-truths. So little interest in the Japanese culture and how they understand work, just pure economic theory (which is also, super shallow). Kind of embarrassing.
"Japan is the heart of soul-crushing overqualification on Earth." Japan may be the heart, but the feeling is not unknown in the Academy: imagine a 45-year-old Assistant professor waiting for the senile Senior to retire, or better, to expire. Et cetera.
You wrote, “In contrast, in a country like the United States where only, say, 40% of adults have the right stuff to do skilled work”
Having a college degree is not synonymous with having the right stuff. And much work that does not require a college degree actually is skilled. Watch a talented carpenter some time, or talk to a competent farmer.
You also wrote, “Imagine, dear reader, if you were stuck being a janitor even though you plainly had the talent to do so much more. It would be a personal tragedy for you — plus a social tragedy for all the consumers of the millions of extra dollars of value you would have produced during your lifetime.”
Not being in a high wage or highly educated job isn’t a tragedy. I work in a high skilled, well paying job in tech, and my standardized tests back in the day were in the top 1%. The most fulfilling job I ever had, hands down, was working with horses, including cleaning stalls, cleaning tack, and scrubbing water troughs.
If I could do it full time and make ends meet, I would literally prefer to be a farmer than work in tech. If I had inherited the family farm, instead of being a techie who grows stuff as a hobby, I would have been a ridiculously overeducated farmer, probably a lot poorer, and happy with it.
Joy comes from making things or doing things. It doesn’t matter if those things are your job or your hobby, and it shouldn’t matter if they’re prestigious or otherwise.
My takeaway from this article is that Bryan Caplan’s brain should be preserved and studied after his (natural) death. The very idea that someone could look at Japan and come away with the notion that the thing that would improve it is millions of unskilled immigrants from the Third World is truly mind boggling and supports the notion that too much time studying the spherical cows of the economics world can derange a man.
This response lacks substance.
If this article made sense to you, I suspect your head lacks substance. One shouldn’t need a study on the effects of incineration to not set oneself on fire.
I completely disagree with you but I find your insults really entertaining! Thank you
"minding my own business is like setting myself on fire"
I understand why you are opposed to immigration.
Yes, letting more people cross government borders to get jobs and houses is like setting your hair on fire. We should deport everyone I don’t like to make sure we’re not lighting our hair on fire with anyone here. We shouldn’t think about it and just keep using crazy analogies.
Sorry, but this is what you sound like.
And yet, Japan has had stagnate per capita income/GDP gains despite an incredibly hard-working and detail-oriented workforce. Yes, you're not Japanese so you probably don't care that the median Japanese isn't as rich as the median American, but the exchange for (on average) shockingly terrific service in Japan at MickeyD's (and other service-oriented places; and mind you, I and my Japanese wife truly enjoy it too) compared to the US is that Japanese-Japanese on average just aren't as rich as their (genetically identical) Japanese-American peers.
Do you believe that Japan would be richer if it had a brown underclass?
Do you believe that having to lock up everything at the convenience store to prevent shoplifting and then hire people to unlock the items on request would make Japan rich?
Why hasn't importing brown people made other countries as rich as the USA? Europe imported a lot of Muslims and it doesn't seem to have made them richer.
Canada and the UK imported a lot of "skilled" Indian immigrants and they've been in decade long per capita recessions.
If I had to guess why Japan is poorer then America I would posit the following:
1) Japan is dramatically less resource poor. It has very little land and natural resources, which has an impact. It's possible to specialize a small portion of your country around that, Tokyo's financial area has a GDP per capita as high as any global city, but not an entire country of 125M. Just what do you think people in these villages in these rural prefectures are going to do? If it was North Dakota they might drill for energy, in Japan not much.
2) I think it's fair at this point to question whether East Asians really are conformist and uncreative relative to their IQ. Every single East Asian country reaches some "catch up" point running the same export oriented growth model (i.e. we tell them to build things that already exist which we want and they do so efficiently with some tweaks). Then it completely stalls. People spend all day doing Red Queen race nonsense.
If you told me there were over a billion people with an average IQ of 105 I would expect way higher output per capita of frontier accomplishment, but it's just not there. They do OK, and their comfortable but mediocre GDP/capita is a reflection of that.
3) The USA seems to have been uniquely successful in developing its tech sector and that drives a lot of its performance. Combined with its vast natural resources and geopolitical advantages and it's unique. Can we really expect Japan to do as well?
Anyway, it's hard to believe that America's secret sauce is having a brown underclass. Our high GDP isn't because people negroes are shooting each other in Detroit or Baltimore. It's being generated by the areas with the fewest of these people. And the #1 problem everyone in those areas complains about is that housing is mega expensive because that's the only way to defacto segregate away from the brown underclass.
I predict that if Bryan got his way Japan would not see any improvement in GDP/capita but it would experience all the joys of having a hostile underclass.
Black Americans contribute lot. Blues, jazz, rock and roll,rap, hip hop are all invented by black americans. The liks of.LeBron James me watching sport more interesting and enjoyable.
It helps to actually look at data.
1. The UK is far whiter than the US.
2. Canada kept up with the US in per capita GDP until 2015. I really doubt the inflection in 2015 is due to immigration policy as their immigration policy hasn't changed.
3. Browning France has been growing per capita GDP pretty well, thank you very much.
4. The big spurt in US growth (from Big Tech, pretty much exclusively) is driven heavily by immigrants.
Indian Immigration To Canada
“Between 2013 and 2023, Indians immigrating to Canada rose from 32,828 to 139,715, an increase of 326%,” according to the NFAP analysis.
Indian enrollment at Canadian universities rose more than 5,800% in the last two decades, from 2,181 in 2000 to 128,928 in 2021, an increase of 126,747 students.
Between 2016 and 2019, Indian international students enrolled in U.S. universities dropped by 13% but increased by 182% at Canadian universities. Diplomatic issues between India and Canada have reduced Indian student visa approvals in the short term.
-------
Indian immigration exploded around the time that Canadian GDP growth stalled.
----
France has the same GDP per capita today as it had in 2010.
----
4. The big spurt in US growth (from Big Tech, pretty much exclusively) is driven heavily by immigrants.
----
Big tech was founded pretty much exclusively by people of European descent.
https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/immigrants-from-where
Indians add virtually nothing to frontier development, though they do a great job of trying to capture secure revenue streams via nepotism and rule breaking. Hence why their own country is such a hell hole.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/non-linear-ethnic-niches
What do you think the United Arab Emirates need?
The UAE have mechanism that make this possible. Islam and honour culture means foreigners don't harass the native women or try to intermarry. Strict laws and a ethnic hierarchy mean that foreigners know their place. This would be difficult for softer societies to emulate. Japan, though not as soft as Europe, would probably have to endure a lot of sexual harassment, illegal immigrants, petty crime, litter etc just like Europe
Japan can limit immigration to the best people. They don't need to be taking in the lowest human capital. Indians tend to be very low crime.
Indians are perfectly fine immigrants, but they do not have quite as disciplined, honest and civil culture as the Japanese, who does?
Indians would likely also likely not being doing the low skilled roles after a couple generations as caplan is alluding too as they are a probably a reasonably high IQ population at least that is my impression from living in the UK. So what is the point in this?
All Japan would get with Indian immigration is a slightly larger population, probably slightly lower civil trust and slightly more corruption and litter. Indians might also be successful in some zero sum ways, they have more verbal IQ on the high end and might be more likely to end up as CEOs though it's unlikely they would add more value.
Indians didn't work out for Canada or the UK.
They're literally working fine. The only problem is lacm of housing supply, and Japan doesn't have that issue
Canada has had stagnant GDP per capita for a decade. I thought all these "skilled" Indians were going to turn it into a paradise on earth?
Instead they are a bunch of shifty mediocrities that steal from food banks and everyone hates them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/no-international-students-as-need-grows-brampton-food-bank-turning-some-away-1.7024375
https://x.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1849217594710011992
Japan builds housing because everyone is Japanese and therefore there is no reason to use housing as a form of segregation. They can achieve high levels of density due to social trust and the low rate of population increase keeps demand low.
If they import foreigners the housing situation would not only become worse because the existing capital stock would be diluted, but also they would have to start pricing a segregation premium into housing.
For a tiny country in which only 29% of its land is habitable this would be a disaster.
Aside from a better climate, religion and culture?
Even with a brutal climate, a religion-not-perfectly-designed-for-post-industrial-societies ;) and a culture ... well, I worked there some years ... - check their TIMMS-results, too. Even with all that, life for them* is paradise there. Because of borders open for workers. * and for the others it is good enough to come there, often even to pay agencies to get work there, and as for millions of tourists: revealed preferences.
Bryan is Jewish. It's not malicious, but Jews have a tendency to follow spherical cow economic/political arguments off of cliffs (see: communism, "anarchocapitalism", etc.) I am glad he is not in a policymaking position in Japan.
I don't think he'd say it would make it better for tourists or even overall depending on how that would be judged, just for most Japanese workers.
A 5 y.o. in Japan goes alone to her school, crosses streets, and takes buses. In Japan, there is almost no crime, and street drugs are unknown. There is no ethnic vote, and no George Floyd Remembrance Day. Why should they ruin their society?
The difference between the West and other countries is that other countries make it almost impossible for immigrants to get citizenship. There won’t be any “ethnic vote” or other patronage if such immigrants were simply not allowed to be citizens.
Remember when mass Hispanic immigration was supposed to turn Texas blue and the majority of them voted for Trump?
It's a trade-off. In return, Japanese-Japanese on average aren't as rich as their ethnically same Japanese-American cousins.
Alcohol abuse is pretty common though.
Places like Italy and Spain are almost as safe as Japan.
Bro you know literally nothing about Japan.
I lived in Japan for awhile and I've traveled around the country. You're clueless.
One reason for that meth usage until the 1960s was that the Japanese military distributed meth to its soldiers, and they came home addicts.
I have had two one-month vacations in Japan, once traveling by train, once by bicycle. Loved every minute of them. By the third week I was getting a good enough accent that they thought I understood their customs better than I did. By the end a week later, I was ready to come home.
I do not think I would enjoy living in Japan. The culture is too fixated on doing things the Japanese way. The tall nail gets hammered down.
And I could not imagine bringing up kids in that culture.
No one is inviting you to move to Japan. All I said was that importing ten - twenty million African immigrants would not improve their lives.
I didn't say anyone was inviting me to move to Japan. I made that up all by my lonesome as my contribution to Peter's discussion. If you feel like butting in, please butt in to your own conversation.
This post would be more persuasive if it included evidence that lower-skilled Japanese workers actually desire to be a manager of Africans or Pakistanis over the status quo.
I think the argument is that there is a social benefit to immigration. Namely, Japanese people become more productive, and produce more for all of humanity.
What individual Japanese people think about this doesn’t seem relevant, as that’s a personal cost, not a social one.
(Not that there aren’t social costs to immigration. I tend to agree with you, that the social costs are larger than what Bryan may think).
In theory, there is also the other option: high-skilled or mid-skilled and disciplined Japanese people stuck in a menial job could emigrate where there is a dearth of such people. For example, I have a large retail company in Central America (600 stores) and I would love to recruit tens of them to be store managers, district managers or even country managers. Of course, the big barriers are the language and I guess the Japanese culture. But this should not be a significant barrier for, say, an Italian or a French. Still, in 30 years in the business I could attract only a handful of these guys. I really don’t know why. They can easily make 4X or 5X what they make in their countries, but they prefer to be stuck in an end-job at 1500 euros per month in their country. Maybe lack of ambition coupled with the extensive welfare, who knows.
Probably partially it that it would suck to live in a country with a higher murder rate
"Probably partially it that it would suck"
WHAT?
People may prefer to live in their home country just because it is their home country.
Europeans have amazing safety nets. Japanese _do_ tend to struggle outside their culture, but you should be able to get terrific talent elsewhere.
This is an interesting thought, but if Japan is brimming with smart, educated people, shouldn't the cream of the crop be able to generate better than a 1% growth rate? Why aren't the smart capable people able to create thier own businesses? I don't understand how "not enough immigrants" can explain this, unless the argument is that the street sweepers get paid too much and losing thier jobs to people who will work for less will encourage them to get a better job, which will then somehow materialize for them. I think there's a lot more to this than immigration, this seems a very weak argument. I know you linked to a paper explaining this in more detail, but you are generally able to save your readers the trouble by making clear common sense arguments so i for one would be interested if you could do that for this, since right now im not buying it :)
I find myself very sympathetic with your points. It seems like Japan is the way it is primarily because of culture, not other aspects. I am not sure that changing much of their culture would make things better reliably, and I don’t see how one brings in lots of immigrants without changing culture.
What about another idea instead of permanently transforming Japan: turn everyone into Japanese people. Making people in low-skill jobs smarter is good.
Even if you don't assume genetic difference they have a Confucian-derived culture and a large degree of conformity and stability at least in part due to the lack of ethnic divisions. That's really hard to copy elsewhere--South Korea and Taiwan are similar but have similar advantages. The Chinese will probably get there eventually but it takes a while to transform a nation of over a billion.
Everywhere else...nah.
How many people do you know in the trades? Those aren't exactly easy jobs and unlike desk jobs, does physically break down your body in your old age. Also, what percentage of college grads did you imagine major in "intersectionality studies"?
I should also note that I know a good number of people in the trades, many of rather advanced age. Some trades are really rough, but most are not, and office work isn’t exactly great for you either. More importantly, most fairly smart tradesmen are running their own company by the time they get old enough to not want to do the work.
According to NCES, in 2022 151,109 bachelor’s degrees were given for “Social Sciences and History.” Much fewer than business and health fields, much more than biomed, engineering and psychology.
So, a fair few of the “What is even this major? What job are you learning?” Type degrees.
Huh? Do you really not understand what econ, poli sci, and history degrees are for?!?
Well, I am fairly well versed in what economics is for, although I would note it often falls under the heading of Business, and the NCES report is not terribly specific about how it categorizes anything.
Poli Sci and History... I do think a lot of those students have not given sufficient thought as to how they are going to use their degrees. Most won't use it in their chosen field.
Now that I am home, I found this better chart on he NCES site https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_318.20.asp "Humanities" seems to be a different category, strangely missing from the previous chart I was looking at, with 252,324 bachelors in 2022. That suggests that it is a different category than the Poli Sci and History, which is its own category, and puts it in third place with 12% of graduates, behind business and health fields. So, quite a few of those majors.
Yes, lots of English majors. What did you think English teachers in your grade schools and HS studied?
I think the Japanese have looked at our ethnic conflicts and insane politics and decided they're going to keep doing their own thing where their products are the envy of the world, their culture is endlessly copied, and five-year-olds can walk to school by themselves.
Data can't be racist. Bryan you are a rare breed that combines kindness and truth, a role modelfor your children and everyone else
I grew up doing quite a bit of hard labor on a ranch. This paved the way for becoming a skilled craftsman and home builder. I paid for two advanced degrees using these skills which meant that I graduated almost debt free. I modeled this kind of diverse work experience to my children. Learning how to work with your body and mind in tandem definitely increased my options for making a reasonable living (though not always easy) for myself and my family. In short, this kind of range ('Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a specialized World by David Epstein') served me well---secured and increased the overall quality of life for me and my family. Those early unskilled labor experiences encouraged me to work hard towards developing more advanced trade skills. Consequently, I have never been unemployed for more than a week or two. My appreciation and respect for "low on the totem pole" service workers like maids, janitors and dishwashers does not skate across the surface of things. Rather, it is hard won and authentic. Ironically, what I am saying here fits with much of what Bryan Caplan wrote in his 2018 book 'The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money'.
"they too feel on a gut level that it’s really bad to end up as a janitor if you have the talent to be an engineer."
I'd like to see the stats on this. How many Japanese janitors have the talent to be an engineer (age adjusted, etc.)?
"The Japanese speak very politely to janitors"
If the janitor were less likely to be massively overqualified, would they be spoken to in a less polite manor? I'm starting to get a Star Trek vibe here. We never see the servers in 10 Forward berated for bad service. They do roll their eyes at annoying impertinent barbers though, but just behind his back.
> But the bonanza is emphatically not just money. Being massively overqualified for your job doesn’t merely make you poor. Being massively overqualified for your job is soul-crushing. And for all its touristic wonders, low-immigration Japan is the heart of soul-crushing overqualification on Earth.
Is Japan more soul-crushed than other countries? That doesn't seem to fit your observation of Japanese workers.
You say “a country like Japan where 80% of adults have the intelligence and discipline to do skilled work” contrasted with 40% in the US. Source?
Something i'm curious about, do japanese or other asians read things like this and feel a lot of pride? Or what do they feel reading this?
That is an insane article, super shallow and absolutely filled with half-truths. So little interest in the Japanese culture and how they understand work, just pure economic theory (which is also, super shallow). Kind of embarrassing.
"Japan is the heart of soul-crushing overqualification on Earth." Japan may be the heart, but the feeling is not unknown in the Academy: imagine a 45-year-old Assistant professor waiting for the senile Senior to retire, or better, to expire. Et cetera.
You wrote, “In contrast, in a country like the United States where only, say, 40% of adults have the right stuff to do skilled work”
Having a college degree is not synonymous with having the right stuff. And much work that does not require a college degree actually is skilled. Watch a talented carpenter some time, or talk to a competent farmer.
You also wrote, “Imagine, dear reader, if you were stuck being a janitor even though you plainly had the talent to do so much more. It would be a personal tragedy for you — plus a social tragedy for all the consumers of the millions of extra dollars of value you would have produced during your lifetime.”
Not being in a high wage or highly educated job isn’t a tragedy. I work in a high skilled, well paying job in tech, and my standardized tests back in the day were in the top 1%. The most fulfilling job I ever had, hands down, was working with horses, including cleaning stalls, cleaning tack, and scrubbing water troughs.
If I could do it full time and make ends meet, I would literally prefer to be a farmer than work in tech. If I had inherited the family farm, instead of being a techie who grows stuff as a hobby, I would have been a ridiculously overeducated farmer, probably a lot poorer, and happy with it.
Joy comes from making things or doing things. It doesn’t matter if those things are your job or your hobby, and it shouldn’t matter if they’re prestigious or otherwise.
Value is NOT just measured in dollars.