Voodoo Abenomics

[Simon_Jester]

I agree that this is a problem.

Then again, it's the category of problem bad governments give into, and good governments try to solve.

[K. A. Pital]

South Korea has installed a working time reduction program which had a lot of success, but only in their internal reference frame. In the general international comparison SK still has some of the longest hours worked. Which is why I said cultural issues create resilient problems.

[Simon_Jester]

Agreed.

It's mostly just that I see this as the biggest problem Japan has: their economy is stagnant, in large part because their service sector working practices are in efficient, which is in turn because their use of their own people's labor is inefficient. Which is made possible in large part by the stupidly long working hours that would be a problem in their own right even if they weren't a contributing factor to Japan's economic stagnation.

I think we have misunderstandings like this a lot, where you tend to mistake me for a typical pro-capitalist whenever I use anything like a standard Western capitalist framework to analyze an economic problem. Thing is, it's not normally that simple for me- I use a lot of the same words that an anarcho-capitalist uses (like "productivity" and "market pressure,") but to me they are simply technical vocabulary; they do not carry moral weight. The only reason I think higher productivity is better than low is because it lets people accomplish more or work less and still get the same results, not because (for instance) it results in higher corporate profits.

[K. A. Pital]

The Eurozone's economy is stagnant even though many of its workers, like in Germany and France, are among the most productive in the world on a per-hour basis. At some point just injecting more and more into the system stops working, I guess. You then have to run hard to just to stay on the same place. I would not be surprised in the least that New Industrial Countries' current and future growth would lead to no growth or very little growth for the developed countries in the coming years.

Abenomics doesn't solve these issues at all, but Japan hardly can muster the strength for radical reform.

[Simon_Jester]

There are a lot of things that go into economic growth; labor productivity is only one of them. And growth of the absolute size of the economy is hard to achieve when the labor force is starting to shrink, or when various other factors are in play.

Also, 'growth' as measured in dollars is an imperfect measure. For example, if Japan figures out how to use labor better and produces the exact same amount of goods and services with 90% as much work, I would count this a 'victory' similar in scale to a 10% increase in Japan's economic output that did NOT involve reducing man-hours worked. Maybe even a greater victory.

But at the moment, Japanese people are working themselves to exhaustion and yet the economy is not growing, and they accomplish less per hour than foreigners in other countries that are no less advanced and educated than themselves. Thus I identify per-hour worker productivity as the bottleneck, at least tentatively.

Other countries, with higher per-hour productivity, may nonetheless have struck bottlenecks of their own.