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It's my personal belief that a lot of the quality of life benefits come from the better income equality over there versus over in America. High progressive tax

It's my personal belief that a lot of the quality of life benefits come from the better income equality over there versus over in America. High progressive tax rates is probably a feature that enables this, so it's just a cost of living one has to accept if they want the benefits. You can't have that "we're in this together" if your neighbor has so much more than you.

numair 5y ago
I completely agree that the flatter, more egalitarian system is more of a feature than a bug. However, at the same time, one of the big problems is that there is an entire layer of people above “the people” who exist in a political-multinational-oligarch cloud who basically extract value for their own benefit. Real wages in Japan haven’t gone up for 20 years or something and are among the lowest (the lowest?) of the world’s major developed economies. The willingness of everyday people to accept their “meager existence” allows these people to slowly drive Japan into oblivion. Everyone should be making more money and working just a bit less than they do here. Shouldn’t surprise you that those corrupt corporate-political types are extremely fond of America, and have many friends in the US political scene...
greggman3 5y ago
I find this kind of BS. The boss at my Japanese company drove to work in the company car and parked in the company parking garage while the rest of us plebs suffer on our 80 minute commute. Yu Suzuki had 5 fancy sports cars while his underlings who worked 120hr weeks to actually create and ship the products he took credit for got paid $30k-$40k a year. Conversely, while the CEO of my USA employer gets paid crazy money he pays his employees 3x to 6x the equivalent Japanese employee.
- chrischen 5y ago
  But is your executive characteristic? I do think they have a seniority bias (young people suffer while more senior people have it easy) though. Jack Dorsey used to take the BART as Twitter CEO (probably doesn’t anymore) but I would not describe that as characteristic behavior. The wealth gap despite what you say is still objectively better than it is in the US. CEOs will always still be paid more.

numair 5y ago

I completely agree that the flatter, more egalitarian system is more of a feature than a bug. However, at the same time, one of the big problems is that there is an entire layer of people above “the people” who exist in a political-multinational-oligarch cloud who basically extract value for their own benefit. Real wages in Japan haven’t gone up for 20 years or something and are among the lowest (the lowest?) of the world’s major developed economies. The willingness of everyday people to accept their “meager existence” allows these people to slowly drive Japan into oblivion. Everyone should be making more money and working just a bit less than they do here. Shouldn’t surprise you that those corrupt corporate-political types are extremely fond of America, and have many friends in the US political scene...

greggman3 5y ago

I find this kind of BS. The boss at my Japanese company drove to work in the company car and parked in the company parking garage while the rest of us plebs suffer on our 80 minute commute. Yu Suzuki had 5 fancy sports cars while his underlings who worked 120hr weeks to actually create and ship the products he took credit for got paid $30k-$40k a year. Conversely, while the CEO of my USA employer gets paid crazy money he pays his employees 3x to 6x the equivalent Japanese employee.

chrischen 5y ago
But is your executive characteristic? I do think they have a seniority bias (young people suffer while more senior people have it easy) though. Jack Dorsey used to take the BART as Twitter CEO (probably doesn’t anymore) but I would not describe that as characteristic behavior. The wealth gap despite what you say is still objectively better than it is in the US. CEOs will always still be paid more.