>Japan and Germany [...] share similar challenges — including their businesses being heavily reliant on fax machines, which are often used as an emblem of unshakable bureaucracies as both markets face an uphill battle to digitize.
Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.
It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
>Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.
Haha, I can totally tell from your skepticism to digitalization that you're German and I agree with your take that that's exactly how digitalization is or will be handled in Germany. Per its track record, if there is a way digitalization could make something annoying even worse, then I am 100% confident that Germany will find it and implement it.
While in the UK/NL or Scandinavia digitalization means replacing 20 pieces of paper with one web form, in Germany I totally expect those 20 pieces of paper to be replaced with 1500 emails while also pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result than when things were paper based. This would be the most typical German government thing ever.
>It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive.
Everyone trapping on your shoulder in person every 5 minutes will make you easily just as unproductive or more.
Has it occurred to you in your example that the interruptions are the main problem and not the communication medium?
At least on slack I can disable notifications or close the app. I can't disable my helicopter boss from buzzing me in person.
>It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
What are you talking about? How's productivity are you referring to? Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany, both for businesses and for citizens.
> pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result
That also happens in the UK, don't worry - except in British Pounds.
> Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany
It is. The counterpoint is that fraud is rampant and cronyism is the order of the day. A lot of stuff that in DE/FR/IT would be pursued by law enforcement as corruption is just part and parcel of public life here in UK.
Sorry, but this is not accurate: People messaging over Slack 100% makes us more effective. Like any technology, including printing 20 pages of status report, there are ways to be efficient with them, and ways to be inefficient with them.
The workforce right now are growing up as digital natives. Time to act like it.
The concept you're missing is that a barrier to communication, like sending the fax, forces one to organize their thoughts before impinging on another person's time.
So while digital communication has a lower round trip time, it also has a lower barrier to entry, which means you get more communications and they're less focused.
This leads to situations like my inbox, with 50 messages a day that are parts of huge unfocused threads and it can take 5 minutes of diligent effort to find out if my attention is even required, and at that point my 'action' will probably be to reply to the thread asking for clarification, setting off the same bullshit task for all the people CC'ed
wonder if this is an opportunity for some enterprising individual to sell llm powered "idea distillation before hitting send" (as a service)...that was intended as a joke...but i can see it being great hahaha.
> When has increased barrier to communication ever been good?
Phone call costs used to mean you probably wanted to answer every phone call you received, rather than missing calls you should have answered because you're so used to ignoring them since most are spam and fraud. IDK about good in terms of humanity or whatever, but if I could snap my fingers and set a $0.05/minute rate on all phone calls, and $0.15 for long distance connections of any kind, I'd do it, because it'd be a net-improvement for everyone I know.
> It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier
The medium is the message. You want to change the message, look at the medium, not the people.
Friend of mine had an idea of an email budget - everyone gets x emails a month. Can't send any after that.
Ok it would never work because idiot senior managers would give themselves 100x then dole out extra to their tamed pets but you can see why the idea is attractive to consider.
Hard agree. Seen too much shit like Kanban boards suddenly sucking because they’re digital and limitless instead of physical and limited in size, or schools sending avalanches of mostly-useless email and other digital messages home where before you’d just have gotten a handful of paper notes in the mail or sent home with kids.
Wait, hold up. Are you saying that anytime you need to ask a coworker, or maybe someone one a different team, a question you send a fax instead of slacking them? Do you all have fax machines in your homes?
It's similar to issues encountered with previous eras of industrialization: when you have a factory, you can make a lot of one thing. So you reshape society around that thing, and now one size fits all, even if it doesn't.
The thing digitalization solved was the paperwork bottleneck(access to raw data), not the information bottleneck(what people need to know to do their jobs). We have a surplus of global firehose information systems, but a scarcity of useful filtering mechanisms, most of them based on traditional indexing(date/time, alphabet, keyword search) or a black box algorithm that usually isn't tuned for your scenario. As well, there are a lot of unaddressed problems with data custody, where access controls tend to be very all-or-nothing and bespoken, and aren't generalized to the whole operating system.
Not quite sure what you're getting at, but that claim is not true. The US economy was roughly comparable in size to the EU's 15 years ago but is now nearly 1/3 larger than the EU + UK, or about 1/2 larger than the EU without the UK: https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
> Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany.
Controling said continent and ensuring policy is tilted in your favour tends to help. Bonus points if your resources are supplied by dictatorial regimes that start wars with or threaten your neighbours keeping them docile.
Isn’t that heavily skewed by Japan’s culture of being in the office for obscenely long stretches? Not that they necessarily have to be productive, but the expectation is to be present.
Yes. If they didn't have to spend every waking hour at work, things like raising a family would be conceivable. Everything is connected and that's part of the reason why Japan's population pyramid is a disaster.
And German office culture is even less presentee-ist than American. Unless you have a relatively high salary, you have a 35-40 hour contract full time, with a lot of us on part time contracts. Pre-Covid, we really were only around for those set hours, with a few flextime accumulated here and there, then burned off within the year. Even with home office, people still tend to stick to their contract hours.
Your employer would be a bit suspicious if you were routinely in the office or logged into the VPN longer than you were booking…
the fact that Japan has wallowed in the backwaters since the 1980s is endlessly fascinating to me. Can't think of another country that had so much potential just voluntarily squander it away because of.. bad culture?
Canada's signed two Faustian bargains - one with the resource extraction economy, and one with the real estate sector.
Neither one is long-term sustainable. Eventually, the oil will be dug out of the ground, and eventually, it won't be able to endlessly generate paper value by trading rat-infested outhouses in Vancouver back-and-forth for 5 million/pop.
It has other exports[1], but they aren't the engine of Canadian economic growth.
[1] (Insert lame joke about how its biggest export is SWEs to the United States.)
Meh, UK is still in the top economies, innovators and militaries in the world and one of the most desirable immigration countries for skilled workers along with having some of the top universities in the world.
Yeah it doesn't rule the waves and 1/3 of the planet anymore like in the "glory days" of the empire but maybe that's for the better.
that's not what it feels like living here, and let's be real, it's that coming from the largest empire the world has ever seen, which in many ways is the problem. since the late 70s our political decisions have been tainted by the false assumption of exceptionalism
Then I suggest you move somewhere in the south of Europe like Italy, Greece, or the Balkans, get a job and rent there, interact with the government bureaucracy and make use of public services, just to get a perspective on what a sad hopeless economic situation and badly managed government that doesn't do anything for you, actually looks like.
I did that. Ignoring the better weather, food, culture, transport, and public services, my disposable income relative to cost of living is much higher. (But what have the Romans ever done for us?)
Try living as a tax payer on local wages there, not as a tourist on UK wages for the food and the weather.
There's a reason miles more young people move for work from the South of Europe to the UK and the only thing moving from the UK to the South of Europe are financially stable retirees for the food and the weather, not for work.
As you have kindly suggested I have been working for companies based here for several years. It's true that the average wages here are poor and that some people move in the direction opposite to my one, but I find your generalisation to be inaccurate and unreasonable.
absolutely booming culturally though. food, tv, comic books, video games, trading cards all extremely popular the world over, which cannot be said for any other nation besides the US, which is almost 3x the size and hasn't earned that position on merit the same way Japan has
IMO, the lower the real estate valuations, the better. Cheap real estate is one of the main points Japan has in its favor right now. Cheap transportation, cheap food, and cheap electricity all contribute to a healthy economy; cheap real estate is no different.
On the telecom side, as with so many others, Japan squandered their early lead by being extremely inward-focused, as usual. Despite their export-oriented economy and a few giants like Toyota and Sony, most Japanese companies are rarely interested in looking beyond their (shrinking) domestic market, resulting in "Galapagos syndrome", where diverse and sophisticated domestic technologies evolve in isolation from the rest of the world, only to eventually be crushed when global competitors catch up and subsequently pass them.
I actually don't believe that these statistics (GDP ranking, etc) are all that useful, for many reasons. I'm just saying that one of the ways Germany and the rest of Europe have pulled ahead, despite having "structural" issues that US neoliberals drone on about incessantly, is with immigration. Japan is notoriously anti-immigrant. This raises its labor costs and creates a more insular culture that fails to adapt quickly enough. Now, its culture might be fine with that, and I respect that choice (up to the point that it becomes racist). Growth isn't everything, and as we see contributes much towards the climate destabilization we are experiencing.
While I am not an expert, the most common cited cause for the Japanese stagnation is the late '80s Japanese asset bubble, possibly worsened by the '85 Plaza Accords where US significantly devalued its currency USD, via currency market manipulation.
From a wider perspective, individuals and countries alike are subject to economic forces that sometimes are beyond their control. The American cultural habit of attributing, without rest, ill fate to moral failing, lacks in nuance. Possibly a byproduct of the historically unique wealth of opportunity bestowed onto the post-war generation.
The asset bubble was a problem, but Japan has also suffered from excessive economic central planning leading to malinvestment. They squandered their resources by literally building bridges to nowhere. The book "Dogs & Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan" by Alex Kerr gives a thorough and balanced explanation of what happened.
Wallowed in backwaters is one way to put a nation with the second highest GDP in the world, extremely low poverty and crime, and rankings generally at the top of every measurable facet most care about including self reported quality of life.
Japan does do very well on some metrics, but there's also ones where they do pretty badly. For example, they do badly on measures of gender equality IIRC.
As measured by their own self reported satisfaction with treatment of genders, or liberal western theories on what gender equality should look like? Would be curious to see the data there.
Germany broke $2 trillion GDP around 2002, so it took about 20 years to overcome Japan. California broke $2T GDP around 2011 so it'll probably take another decade for California to overcome Japan.
I mean it's still the 8th biggest economy in the world, so not exactly small. People always find this very surprising giving all the issues the country has but the north has many centuries of high-end manufacturing history. In particular very expensive, very specialised machines used in manufacturing of everything else.
The industrial sector was riding the long wave of public investment started with the Marshall Plan. The Socialist Party was brought into government in the early 1960s (to lock out the larger Communist Party), and ensured the robust program of public funding for industrial efforts (and civil servants) would continue and expand. This created a feedback loop whereby public debt would grow, forcing currency devaluation, which boosted exports, which made the system look so successful that further increasing public debt was seen as acceptable - and so on and so forth. In addition, a few underdeveloped regions exploited the deflated exchange rates to bootstrap cheap manufacturing, particularly in the North-East, right about that time.
The game came crashing down in the early '90s, when credit markets pulled the plug as the debt/gdp ratio hit triple digits and looked out of control. The only way to re-establish credibility was to dramatically cut spending and increase taxes (infamously, one year the government made an overnight withdrawal from all private bank accounts over a certain balance, completely unannounced!) and hook Italian fortunes to the European integration effort, piggybacking on the almighty Deutschemark. This stabilised things but effectively ended the boom times for good, since we cannot compete at the cheap end anymore.
Still, the country continues to be a solid G8 member and produces a lot of excellent fare - the world queues up to buy Italian brands, from automotive to food, and most of them are absolutely worth the money. Among other things, chances are that your sunglasses and eyeglasses are made in Italy, even if you don't know it.
In ten years it won’t matter. The top 3 in the world will be USA, China and India. Then it will become China, india and USA. Unless Germany and Japan change their birth rates they will start shrinking
China's birth rate is much lower than the US, but both are below replacement. US is only slightly below. India is slightly above, but falling.
IMHO the countries to dominate the 21st century will be those that attract the largest number of high quality immigrants. Countries that do not will stagnate. Countries that drive quality people away (brain drain) will collapse.
The US has an huge advantage there unless we stupidly close our borders because of racism and fear.
China will fare poorly if rising authoritarianism and low birth rates lead to both declining population and population loss. Nobody migrates to authoritarian countries unless they have nowhere better to go and are fleeing something a lot worse.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadPreach it brother.
>However, Germany lacks Japan’s unique currency woes.
Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany.
Also, dupe from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619
Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.
It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
Haha, I can totally tell from your skepticism to digitalization that you're German and I agree with your take that that's exactly how digitalization is or will be handled in Germany. Per its track record, if there is a way digitalization could make something annoying even worse, then I am 100% confident that Germany will find it and implement it.
While in the UK/NL or Scandinavia digitalization means replacing 20 pieces of paper with one web form, in Germany I totally expect those 20 pieces of paper to be replaced with 1500 emails while also pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result than when things were paper based. This would be the most typical German government thing ever.
>It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive.
Everyone trapping on your shoulder in person every 5 minutes will make you easily just as unproductive or more.
Has it occurred to you in your example that the interruptions are the main problem and not the communication medium?
At least on slack I can disable notifications or close the app. I can't disable my helicopter boss from buzzing me in person.
>It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
What are you talking about? How's productivity are you referring to? Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany, both for businesses and for citizens.
That also happens in the UK, don't worry - except in British Pounds.
> Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany
It is. The counterpoint is that fraud is rampant and cronyism is the order of the day. A lot of stuff that in DE/FR/IT would be pursued by law enforcement as corruption is just part and parcel of public life here in UK.
The workforce right now are growing up as digital natives. Time to act like it.
So while digital communication has a lower round trip time, it also has a lower barrier to entry, which means you get more communications and they're less focused.
This leads to situations like my inbox, with 50 messages a day that are parts of huge unfocused threads and it can take 5 minutes of diligent effort to find out if my attention is even required, and at that point my 'action' will probably be to reply to the thread asking for clarification, setting off the same bullshit task for all the people CC'ed
Phone call costs used to mean you probably wanted to answer every phone call you received, rather than missing calls you should have answered because you're so used to ignoring them since most are spam and fraud. IDK about good in terms of humanity or whatever, but if I could snap my fingers and set a $0.05/minute rate on all phone calls, and $0.15 for long distance connections of any kind, I'd do it, because it'd be a net-improvement for everyone I know.
> It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier
The medium is the message. You want to change the message, look at the medium, not the people.
Ok it would never work because idiot senior managers would give themselves 100x then dole out extra to their tamed pets but you can see why the idea is attractive to consider.
The thing digitalization solved was the paperwork bottleneck(access to raw data), not the information bottleneck(what people need to know to do their jobs). We have a surplus of global firehose information systems, but a scarcity of useful filtering mechanisms, most of them based on traditional indexing(date/time, alphabet, keyword search) or a black box algorithm that usually isn't tuned for your scenario. As well, there are a lot of unaddressed problems with data custody, where access controls tend to be very all-or-nothing and bespoken, and aren't generalized to the whole operating system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Germany's GDP is #3 (nominal) or #5 (PPP) [2].
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany
UPDATE: fixed the statement, previous was about world trade share.
Your link [1] shows that the EU surpasses US in international trade, not in GDP.
Although the statement still holds, but it's "slightly" not "greatly" now.
But, as I was corrected below, they meant "sixth" as share, not as rank.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/USA/EU/EUQ
[2] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/USA/EU/EUQ
Controling said continent and ensuring policy is tilted in your favour tends to help. Bonus points if your resources are supplied by dictatorial regimes that start wars with or threaten your neighbours keeping them docile.
Japan 53.2 USD
Germany 88 USD
Your employer would be a bit suspicious if you were routinely in the office or logged into the VPN longer than you were booking…
Canada’s economy has tripled in size since 1995. Japan’s economy is smaller than it was in 1995.
Neither one is long-term sustainable. Eventually, the oil will be dug out of the ground, and eventually, it won't be able to endlessly generate paper value by trading rat-infested outhouses in Vancouver back-and-forth for 5 million/pop.
It has other exports[1], but they aren't the engine of Canadian economic growth.
[1] (Insert lame joke about how its biggest export is SWEs to the United States.)
Ukraine?
Belarus?
Brasil?
Russia?
Turkey?
The Balkans?
Yeah it doesn't rule the waves and 1/3 of the planet anymore like in the "glory days" of the empire but maybe that's for the better.
Then I suggest you move somewhere in the south of Europe like Italy, Greece, or the Balkans, get a job and rent there, interact with the government bureaucracy and make use of public services, just to get a perspective on what a sad hopeless economic situation and badly managed government that doesn't do anything for you, actually looks like.
There's a reason miles more young people move for work from the South of Europe to the UK and the only thing moving from the UK to the South of Europe are financially stable retirees for the food and the weather, not for work.
As you have kindly suggested I have been working for companies based here for several years. It's true that the average wages here are poor and that some people move in the direction opposite to my one, but I find your generalisation to be inaccurate and unreasonable.
but primarily thinking of:
- nikkei/real estate not past its dotcom peak
- telecoms/internet infra generally 1 generation behind most other developed countries
- anecdotally seemingly very hostile/unstable politics especially to women and immigrants
- i vaguely remember some revisionist history around their ww2 atrocities?
On the telecom side, as with so many others, Japan squandered their early lead by being extremely inward-focused, as usual. Despite their export-oriented economy and a few giants like Toyota and Sony, most Japanese companies are rarely interested in looking beyond their (shrinking) domestic market, resulting in "Galapagos syndrome", where diverse and sophisticated domestic technologies evolve in isolation from the rest of the world, only to eventually be crushed when global competitors catch up and subsequently pass them.
2. Not true. Fiber is so ubiquitous unlike the US and maybe Germany?
3. For woman, it's changing but it takes long time to be applied to real world.
4. Such people exists of course. A problem is that a part of long running ruling party is linked to such people.
From a wider perspective, individuals and countries alike are subject to economic forces that sometimes are beyond their control. The American cultural habit of attributing, without rest, ill fate to moral failing, lacks in nuance. Possibly a byproduct of the historically unique wealth of opportunity bestowed onto the post-war generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord
http://alex-kerr.com/html/dogs___demons__english_.html
Japan does do very well on some metrics, but there's also ones where they do pretty badly. For example, they do badly on measures of gender equality IIRC.
1987:
US $4,855B
Japan $2,532B
Germany $1,298B
Italy $805B
UK $745B
The game came crashing down in the early '90s, when credit markets pulled the plug as the debt/gdp ratio hit triple digits and looked out of control. The only way to re-establish credibility was to dramatically cut spending and increase taxes (infamously, one year the government made an overnight withdrawal from all private bank accounts over a certain balance, completely unannounced!) and hook Italian fortunes to the European integration effort, piggybacking on the almighty Deutschemark. This stabilised things but effectively ended the boom times for good, since we cannot compete at the cheap end anymore.
Still, the country continues to be a solid G8 member and produces a lot of excellent fare - the world queues up to buy Italian brands, from automotive to food, and most of them are absolutely worth the money. Among other things, chances are that your sunglasses and eyeglasses are made in Italy, even if you don't know it.
https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/india-to-surpass-ge...
IMHO the countries to dominate the 21st century will be those that attract the largest number of high quality immigrants. Countries that do not will stagnate. Countries that drive quality people away (brain drain) will collapse.
The US has an huge advantage there unless we stupidly close our borders because of racism and fear.
China will fare poorly if rising authoritarianism and low birth rates lead to both declining population and population loss. Nobody migrates to authoritarian countries unless they have nowhere better to go and are fleeing something a lot worse.