6 ms·

Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding

59 points by m463 1y ago

alephnerd 1y ago
Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the average salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0] A similar relative difference didn't seem to exist in the Canada (which I'm using to extrapolate for the US) around that time [1]. It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan. Essentially, shipbuilding in Japan in the 50s and 60s would have been the equivalent of being a Software Engineer in the US today, and it was treated as an engineering/STEM disciple [2] instead of as a blue collar semi-skilled discipline in the US. I can safely say a similar trend happened in South Korea in the 1970s-80s as well according to one of my professors back in the day who specifically specialized in Korea and Japan policy and advised Hyundai and Samsung back then, which lead to a similar decrease in shipbuilding capacity in Japan. Unsurprisingly, this trend can be seen to this day in any industry - be it chip design, VFX, battery manufacturing, etc. I've noticed a similar trend in distributed systems/infra/os/networking/cybersecurity as well, where American schools skip teaching systems or architecture fundamentals in order to overindex on Theory/Applied Math whereas NAND-to-Tetris is the default philosophy in programs in Israel, India, and the CEE. [0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602 [1] - https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statcan/42-206/CS42-206-1965-eng.pdf https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statc... [2] - https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japans-phenomenal-shipbuilders https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japan...
- palmotea 1y ago
  > Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the median salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0] ... It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan. It would be interesting to use wage and salary controls to drive talented workers out of certain industries and into more productive ones. For instance, cap total compensation and benefits for people working in advertising (including adtech) at say, $130k/year. People working on cryptocurrency could be capped at 2x minimum wage. It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be supported, but it seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    > seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries That would only incentivize a brain drain. A good example of this is software engineering in UK, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Japan, as SWE salaries in those countries are not significantly different compared to other vocations. Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively. You can't "command economy" innovation - it can only be nudged. The solution I've seen most industrial planners use is provide tax holidays and subsidizes for targeted industries, as this helps reduce the upfront cost of hiring, and does give wiggle room to raise compensation. Linking that with production, timeline locks, or even tariffs tends to help force an ecosystem to develop - which is what Japan used to build their shipbuilding and automotive industries in the post-war era.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, And what does it do with that knowledge? > and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively. Crypto and AI both use GPUs, but I'm not under the impression that AI people repurposed old crypto mines for anything (e.g. crypto mines used janky racks of consumer GPUs, AI typically uses specialized high-end equipment).
      - alephnerd 1y ago
        > And what does it do with that knowledge? Notice how I talked about HPC, distributed systems, and cybersecurity in my comment? > I'm not under the impression that AI people repurposed old crypto mines for anything The crypto boom helped incentivize the scaling out of GPU design and fabrication, just like how video games helped with the first iteration in the 2000s. There's a reason the concept of "dual use technology" has gained currency
  - 1y ago
- caycep 1y ago
  I'm reading this blog, and the debate regarding the role of industry vs deindustrialization came to mind...was decline of shipbuilding in the US due to better paying jobs doing less dangerous work elsewhere?
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular regional power that concentrated on our continent and some archipelagos with limited strategic value until WW2. It was the UK that was the center of commercial shipbuilding before the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese took that mantle. The US had a decent military shipbuilding industry, but they atrophed after the Cold War ended, and the incentive for naval warfare capacity receded until recently.
    - newsclues 1y ago
      WW2 ship building in the US was massive and the required infrastructure doesn’t just go away. The US built over 3,600 cargo ships, 700+ tankers, and 1,300+ naval vessels, in a few years!
  - mandevil 1y ago
    The US was never a commercial shipbuilding hub once the transition was made to metal ships. During the timber ship era, the huge quantities of quality lumber the US had meant that they were world class at shipbuilding, but metal ships? Not so much outside of direct production for the World Wars(1). I mean, the fact that the US passed the Jones Act in 1920 is a pretty strong signal that even then the US was not viable in commercial shipbuilding. The US Navy, which has been tied for the largest or exclusively the largest in the world for over a century, meant that military shipbuilding was in a better state(2) but still not super competitive- few countries have ever bought the direct products of American yards- yards in the US mostly serve the USN and then sometimes the USN will transfer ships they don't need to other nations. 1: And even then, a whole lot of it was unskilled people learning by doing, and making mistakes. 2: There are many caveats, but it appears that British shipyards were probably more manpower efficient building warships than the US was in WW2. D.K. Brown discusses the evidence in _Nelson to Vanguard_. It's not perfectly clear- because hours were charged to contracts differently in the two countries, the fact that British ships charged fewer hours to a ship doesn't necessarily mean that they used fewer hours in actuality (while everyone counted laborers on a dock for hours, how do you handle hours spent doing accounts payable? Or material deliveries, or training? There are differences in how they were counted between countries, and Brown was unable to correct for them). It is also true that the US produced warships faster chronologically, so it is possible that the US threw so many bodies at ship construction that they went past the point of manpower efficiency to get less time spent in the yards. But, overall, British shipbuilders seem to have been more manpower efficient than US yards during WW2, as far as warship production.
DrNosferatu 1y ago
[flagged]
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  I've never seen a convincing explanation from the laissez-faire neoliberal crowd how their view of the world squares with the fact that all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention. They generally handwave it away and try to change the subject as quickly as possible.
  - throwaway13337 1y ago
    When you have the blueprint of what to build with a large export market ready to buy, it's easier to plan an economy. Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow. Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie. Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates. Nothing works forever.
    - DrNosferatu 1y ago
      You mean like integrated circuits?
  - bpodgursky 1y ago
    I mean, the simple answer is that people in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are all poorer than the US and EU. Japan had decades to catch up and failed to do so. The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives. Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.
    - 1y ago
rufus_foreman 1y ago
"At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%"
dumdedum123 1y ago
That's an interesting take. I read the article and it sounds like the US invented modern shipbuilding during WW2, and the Japanese just copied it and ran with it. But ok.
- hbarka 1y ago
  Have you not heard of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)? It’s quite famous with historic naval battles and modern battleships. But ok.
  - dumdedum123 1y ago
    I'm just going off the article. Did you read it?
  - ahazred8ta 1y ago
    Japan had modern steel battleships in 1904. Dumdedum123 is talking about modern post-1930s shipBUILDING techniques involving prefab subassemblies.
- barry-cotter 1y ago
  Same things with statistical process management and quality control.
- bluGill 1y ago
  The us invented modern management in wwii - but it was perfected in japan after the war. Ships were built all over to old management processes but modern management made a big difference in cost, time, and quaity.

59 points by m463 1y ago

Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the average salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0] A similar relative difference didn't seem to exist in the Canada (which I'm using to extrapolate for the US) around that time [1]. It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan. Essentially, shipbuilding in Japan in the 50s and 60s would have been the equivalent of being a Software Engineer in the US today, and it was treated as an engineering/STEM disciple [2] instead of as a blue collar semi-skilled discipline in the US. I can safely say a similar trend happened in South Korea in the 1970s-80s as well according to one of my professors back in the day who specifically specialized in Korea and Japan policy and advised Hyundai and Samsung back then, which lead to a similar decrease in shipbuilding capacity in Japan. Unsurprisingly, this trend can be seen to this day in any industry - be it chip design, VFX, battery manufacturing, etc. I've noticed a similar trend in distributed systems/infra/os/networking/cybersecurity as well, where American schools skip teaching systems or architecture fundamentals in order to overindex on Theory/Applied Math whereas NAND-to-Tetris is the default philosophy in programs in Israel, India, and the CEE. [0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602 [1] - https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statcan/42-206/CS42-206-1965-eng.pdf https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statc... [2] - https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japans-phenomenal-shipbuilders https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japan...

palmotea 1y ago
> Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the median salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0] ... It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan. It would be interesting to use wage and salary controls to drive talented workers out of certain industries and into more productive ones. For instance, cap total compensation and benefits for people working in advertising (including adtech) at say, $130k/year. People working on cryptocurrency could be capped at 2x minimum wage. It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be supported, but it seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries That would only incentivize a brain drain. A good example of this is software engineering in UK, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Japan, as SWE salaries in those countries are not significantly different compared to other vocations. Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively. You can't "command economy" innovation - it can only be nudged. The solution I've seen most industrial planners use is provide tax holidays and subsidizes for targeted industries, as this helps reduce the upfront cost of hiring, and does give wiggle room to raise compensation. Linking that with production, timeline locks, or even tariffs tends to help force an ecosystem to develop - which is what Japan used to build their shipbuilding and automotive industries in the post-war era.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, And what does it do with that knowledge? > and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively. Crypto and AI both use GPUs, but I'm not under the impression that AI people repurposed old crypto mines for anything (e.g. crypto mines used janky racks of consumer GPUs, AI typically uses specialized high-end equipment).
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      > And what does it do with that knowledge? Notice how I talked about HPC, distributed systems, and cybersecurity in my comment? > I'm not under the impression that AI people repurposed old crypto mines for anything The crypto boom helped incentivize the scaling out of GPU design and fabrication, just like how video games helped with the first iteration in the 2000s. There's a reason the concept of "dual use technology" has gained currency
- 1y ago
caycep 1y ago
I'm reading this blog, and the debate regarding the role of industry vs deindustrialization came to mind...was decline of shipbuilding in the US due to better paying jobs doing less dangerous work elsewhere?
- alephnerd 1y ago
  The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular regional power that concentrated on our continent and some archipelagos with limited strategic value until WW2. It was the UK that was the center of commercial shipbuilding before the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese took that mantle. The US had a decent military shipbuilding industry, but they atrophed after the Cold War ended, and the incentive for naval warfare capacity receded until recently.
  - newsclues 1y ago
    WW2 ship building in the US was massive and the required infrastructure doesn’t just go away. The US built over 3,600 cargo ships, 700+ tankers, and 1,300+ naval vessels, in a few years!
- mandevil 1y ago
  The US was never a commercial shipbuilding hub once the transition was made to metal ships. During the timber ship era, the huge quantities of quality lumber the US had meant that they were world class at shipbuilding, but metal ships? Not so much outside of direct production for the World Wars(1). I mean, the fact that the US passed the Jones Act in 1920 is a pretty strong signal that even then the US was not viable in commercial shipbuilding. The US Navy, which has been tied for the largest or exclusively the largest in the world for over a century, meant that military shipbuilding was in a better state(2) but still not super competitive- few countries have ever bought the direct products of American yards- yards in the US mostly serve the USN and then sometimes the USN will transfer ships they don't need to other nations. 1: And even then, a whole lot of it was unskilled people learning by doing, and making mistakes. 2: There are many caveats, but it appears that British shipyards were probably more manpower efficient building warships than the US was in WW2. D.K. Brown discusses the evidence in _Nelson to Vanguard_. It's not perfectly clear- because hours were charged to contracts differently in the two countries, the fact that British ships charged fewer hours to a ship doesn't necessarily mean that they used fewer hours in actuality (while everyone counted laborers on a dock for hours, how do you handle hours spent doing accounts payable? Or material deliveries, or training? There are differences in how they were counted between countries, and Brown was unable to correct for them). It is also true that the US produced warships faster chronologically, so it is possible that the US threw so many bodies at ship construction that they went past the point of manpower efficiency to get less time spent in the yards. But, overall, British shipbuilders seem to have been more manpower efficient than US yards during WW2, as far as warship production.

DrNosferatu 1y ago

[flagged]

Analemma_ 1y ago
I've never seen a convincing explanation from the laissez-faire neoliberal crowd how their view of the world squares with the fact that all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention. They generally handwave it away and try to change the subject as quickly as possible.
- throwaway13337 1y ago
  When you have the blueprint of what to build with a large export market ready to buy, it's easier to plan an economy. Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow. Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie. Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates. Nothing works forever.
  - DrNosferatu 1y ago
    You mean like integrated circuits?
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  I mean, the simple answer is that people in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are all poorer than the US and EU. Japan had decades to catch up and failed to do so. The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives. Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.
  - 1y ago

rufus_foreman 1y ago

"At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%"

dumdedum123 1y ago

That's an interesting take. I read the article and it sounds like the US invented modern shipbuilding during WW2, and the Japanese just copied it and ran with it. But ok.

hbarka 1y ago
Have you not heard of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)? It’s quite famous with historic naval battles and modern battleships. But ok.
- dumdedum123 1y ago
  I'm just going off the article. Did you read it?
- ahazred8ta 1y ago
  Japan had modern steel battleships in 1904. Dumdedum123 is talking about modern post-1930s shipBUILDING techniques involving prefab subassemblies.
barry-cotter 1y ago
Same things with statistical process management and quality control.
bluGill 1y ago
The us invented modern management in wwii - but it was perfected in japan after the war. Ships were built all over to old management processes but modern management made a big difference in cost, time, and quaity.