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Those who think Japan is unique in its condition and/or that the answer to its problems is more of the same old "advice" as proffered by standard issue economis

• laotzu 11y ago
  Growth for the sake of growth is cancer
  • djsumdog 11y ago
    Exactly, you cannot have infinite growth. Consumerism and planned obsolescence depend on ever expanding growth. Why can't we just have...enough? Why don't we create things that last decades instead of years? We can scale down, consume less, pollute less. We could have fewer factories that produce higher quality products. We could pay people more. We could have a minimum income so we'd get more art and entertainment instead of useless plastic shit. It's not possible because our current heavily capitalistic world view is ingrained so deeply in the minds of everyone in high income countries. I've mentioned it before, but Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an incredible book that goes into the history of money, debt and slavery. It's a life-changing book.
    • api_or_ipa 11y ago
      Unlimited growth in capital is impossible, see the Solow growth model taught in intermediate macro classes the world over. Growth in human capital, education, productivity and ultimately technology is much harder to analyze. On one hand, these things are subject to decay similar to capital depreciation; on the other, we've escaped every Malthusian catastrophe through innovation and technological growth.
    • madhermit 11y ago
      I concur with your description of the symptoms and your desired outcome. However, the current state of affairs has less to do with capitalism in general and more to do with the western world's addiction to short term results resulting from subscribing to Keynesian economic theory.
      • tamana 11y ago
        What does keynsiean theory have to do with building low quality goods?
        • clock_tower 11y ago
          I think there's a Keynsian economist who denies that the broken-window fallacy is a fallacy -- who believes that it's better to have to build and continually replace shoddy goods. Does anyone know the details on this?
          • schoen 11y ago
            There's Keynes himself on generating employment by burying money in the ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment,_Interest_and_Money#Book_III:_The_Propensity_to_Consume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme... I'm not sure if that example is exactly equivalent to breaking windows and paying people to fix them (for example, maybe it matters a great deal for his view that it's the government which is paying for the demand stimulus).
            • clock_tower 11y ago
              Found it: it's Paul Krugman who advocates for this -- at least if this link (disclaimer: just skimmed the article, didn't check it or its context for their political views) is accurate: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/12/lol-more-problems-for-krugmans-broken.html http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/12/lol-more-proble...
              • deleted 11y ago
    • laotzu 11y ago
      "He who knows enough is enough will always have enough" -Lao Tzu Yes, I would agree that implementing a basic income is not a problem of technical feasibility or lack of resources but a problem of user buy in. I've read at least half of Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years, pretty interesting stuff which points out some of the false assumptions at the heart of the mainstream sociopolitical game. For anyone interested, here is the pdf version: https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf It will definitely change the way you view "debt" which is such an ambiguous term in this day and age of trillion dollar debts.
    • clock_tower 11y ago
      I'd also recommend Byron Tully's _The Old Money Book_; its main advice is to have _enough_, to buy things that last decades instead of years, to scale down, consume less, pollute less... In short, I think you'll agree with what it's saying.
  • VonGuard 11y ago
    Tell that to your VCs.
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      We cut the VCs out then?
  • hackuser 11y ago
    I agree, but we still cannot afford may things we need, such as providing adequate health care to all people.
  • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    A society without growth looks like Mandarin China. You want growth for the sake of people, to provide a rising standard of living.
    • clock_tower 11y ago
      The average fortune is dissipated in three generations. (The average medieval noble family was back to being commoners in three generations; and the average Chinese noble family... well, Chinese noble titles degraded by one rank every generation, and every generation had to pass the imperial examinations to get a lucrative government job, so there was a _lot_ of churn there.) Even without growth, you have a lot of social mobility -- downwards as well as upwards.
      • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
        Sure - shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. Surely Europe between, say 1760 and 1900 looks different than China in the same period. Perhaps 100 years from now, it will be decided that the Chinese Mandarins were right after all , but that's not consistent with how we look at the world today. And given some of the posts I've seen here, maybe it will be like that. You didn't have to explain why growth was of value 20 years ago - outside a few odd cases, it was assumed.
    • laotzu 11y ago
      It's really about being able to match growth with sustainability.
• marvin 11y ago
  Do we agree on what "growth" means in this instance? Is is possible to have increased leisure/increased standard of living/increased health/decreasing cost of living over time, without having an incerase in GDP and an average positive return on capital? Or do we give up the expectancy of a better life for everyone if we give up economic growth as we know it?
  • chimeracoder 11y ago
    > Do we agree on what "growth" means in this instance? There's a disconnect between how economists use certain terms as well-defined technical jargon and how non-economists adopt them colloquially.[0] This leads to a lot of confusion when people try to discuss economics without understanding the precise meanings of the terms at play. For the rest of this comment, I'm going to use the economic meaning of these terms, because there is agreement among economists about what "growth" means (though not how to accomplish it). > Or do we give up the expectancy of a better life for everyone if we give up economic growth as we know it? Yes, by definition. It would be impossible to have "a better life for everyone" without economic growth. "A better life for everyone" is economic growth, by definition (the creation of more value - whether tangible or not - given access to the same limited input resources). > Is is possible to have increased leisure/increased standard of living/increased health/decreasing cost of living over time That is considered "growth" to an economist, yes. > without having an incerase in GDP and an average positive return on capital? In theory, yes, but it turns out that an increase in GDP is so highly correlated with economic growth empirically, as well as so intrinsically linked from first principles, that they are usually used interchangeably in most discussions. There are a few degenerate cases in which an increase in GDP does not actually correspond to economic growth, but they're pretty esoteric and not broadly applicable. [0] As an analogy, imagine a bunch of non-programmers debating a CS paper about 'complexity' of an algorithm, and using the term 'complexity' to mean by their ability to understand how it works. That may be a relevant metric, and it may even be related to the technical use of the term 'complexity' (complexity class), but it's not really comparing apples to apples even though it's using the same word.
    • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
• jernfrost 11y ago
  But the growth problems of Japan is largely an illusion and myth caused by population decline. Growth per capita in Japan has been completely normal in the supposed terrible years. It is the population decline which causes the overall GDP growth to look anemic. Naturally it is growth per capita which matters as this is what improves the living conditions of people. There are many countries with high GDP growth but which also has higher population growth causing everybody actually to get poorer. That is not something anybody should want to emulate. But of course low total GDP growth looks bad to business because the markets for their goods does not expand.
  • jessriedel 11y ago
    What time period are you talking about? In 1991, per capita GDP in US and Japan were both ~$32k in 2005 USD. But now it's ~$38k for Japan and $47k for US. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-per-capita http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-per-capita
    • tosseraccount 11y ago
      "A look at the underlying accounting, however, suggests that, far from underperforming, Japan may have outperformed. For a start, in a little noticed change, United States statisticians in the 1980s embarked on an increasingly aggressive use of the so-called hedonic method of adjusting for inflation, an approach that in the view of many experts artificially boosts a nation’s apparent growth rate. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-story-of-japans-economic-success.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-st... Japan was the "bad guy" in 1990, they had a lot incentive to downplay their position in subsequent years. [ dang, is that you? chill, dude ]
    • sitkack 11y ago
      Per capita statistics encourage a false assumption of sharing. It isn't measuring what most people think it is.
• phkahler 11y ago
  >> It's not impossible that we will look back in 20 years and see Japan not as some sort of failure but simply as the first society that had to learn to live without growth. They still haven't learned, they're trying really really hard to force growth. Negative interest rates can be seen as a tax on inactivity, and while it's been talked about in the US, I think it comes too close to taxing assets for the rich to embrace it.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • tankenmate 11y ago
    Indeed, one may view it as the central banks' wealth tax to reverse (however small) income inequality which will lead back to more growth.
  • hackuser 11y ago
    > I think it comes too close to taxing assets for the rich to embrace it. What's wrong with taxing assets (wealth)? I don't know the full economic implications, but I think it may be more fair than taxing income. Wealth is a much better measure of a person's financial strength. Consider: * Because we tax income, a person with $1 billion in assets who makes $100,000 pays less tax than a person with $0 assets and makes $150,000. * Because we tax income, a person who loses all their assets in the housing collapse but earns $100,000 pays more tax than the person whose assets appreciate $1 million but earns only $50,000 in income. * If we tax wealth, future taxes are much more predictable, enabling more efficient long-term investment and planning. I could make a pretty good guess about what my tax bill will be next year, 5 years from now, etc. The billionaire can make much longer-term projections. As a rough estimate of the wealth tax rate: One estimate of total wealth in the US is $80 trillion and the federal government takes in ~$3 trillion in revenue. By those numbers, the wealth tax rate would be 3.75% for the average American, if all that revenue were replaced by a wealth tax.
    • refurb 11y ago
      But wealth isn't just a pile of cash under someone's bed. It's usually held as assets: homes, securities, land, etc. Do you really want to require someone to sell 3.75% of their stake in a start-up every year so they can pay the taxes on it?