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tky_phoenix t1_itsat5q wrote

Reply to comment by Twin_Spoons in Eli5: I don't understand why there seems to be a general consensus that gdp will continue a trend of growth, and why this would be beneficial, considering the cyclical nature of economies and empires rising and falling. Isn't economic downturn on some level unavoidable or even beneficial? by candymannequin

A good example of this is Japan. They have a shrinking population and in order to keep growing the economy they pushed for more women to go working and elderly to keep working longer. In addition they are trying to slowly allow more foreigners into the country. This is meant to either stabilize or even grow the workforce. At the same time they have to work on digital transformation as their productivity is really low.

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FleetAdmiralFader t1_itsv9ak wrote

Japan is a wild land of contradictions. The general public considers them some of the most technologically advanced nations and yet they are extremely conservative and resistant to change culturally. It's almost like they create efficiency tools exclusively for export and domestically simply accomplish everything by shear force of will and scale of manpower because god forbid they change an existing process.

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tky_phoenix t1_itt0gh4 wrote

A lot of it comes from a “no man left behind” mentality. They won’t stop using something if there is still somebody using it. Took them forever to stop good old pager services. On the one hand you have pretty advanced payment methods, super high tech toilets. On the other hand they still use faxes a lot. I worked in a business where global asked us to join their digital marketing campaign to attract customers to events. We had to tell them “sorry, unless you fax the info, you won’t get much traction here” and we were not kidding.

Lastly, Japan is/was great with hardware but they are incredibly bad at software. Their website design is - by European or North American standards - incredibly bad.

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