Progress without purpose is not progress. GDP over quality of life is like measuring your success of curing HIV in a human using bleach. You’ve succeeded, but for what?
There are side effects to growth. We lose cultural practices, we lose languages, we lose neighborhoods, we lose species, we lose entire ecologies.
I actually really appreciate the conservative (well...Republican) argument that sometimes it’s worth it. Maybe we should burn some fossil fuels to help developing countries build economically, bring down mortality, be able to support larger investments, etc, in exchange for some extinctions, and the loss of some indigenous culture. I’m open to that.
But you also have to be open to the fact that sometimes it’s not worth it, and ask what does it look like if we were to try to preserve our cultural and biological heritage. This is a conservative ideal too.
And when I think about how to do that, I am drawn back to Japan over and over who solved many of these problems hundreds or thousands of years ago. Japan has already asked the question: “should we destroy all of our native ecologies and cultures in order to fuel industrial growth?” And they are one of the few countries who has taken a stance on that issue, and succeeded at preserving things America seems destined to continually destroy in its relentless path towards an industrial monoculture.
We can’t write that off as provincialism or regressiveness. We (in the U.S.) have something to learn here, and the advantage is not entirely ours.
From my own experiences living there, Japan may have a strong sense of community that shines during crises, but that connection is often only surface level. Relationships are heavily compartmentalized. You may have drinking buddies, golf friends, etc. But they aren't friends in the sense that you'll visit them outside of those activities or really open up to them to reveal your vulnerable side. If an older person loses a spouse, they often don't have anyone else for companionship.
Japan's suicide rate is still among the highest in the world and 2nd highest of rich, industrialized countries. It is the leading cause of death for women 15-34, who are amongst the longest lived in the worls.
Career satisfaction is also pretty low. The reality of work. The system is based on seniority. Hours are unecessarily long, most likely hurting produxtivity. Gaining advancement based upon merit is rare.
I think the problem arises before that, from a civilization that only respects what it can quantify.
They don't want to move forward, under the condition that Japan would still be rich and prosperous as it is/was today.
No, not anymore.
The Japanese has lost their electronics industry to US/South Korea/China. The myth of Made by Japan equals high quality is debunked by scandals that just doesn't seem to stop. And look at the crazy policies Japan had used to stimulate their economy. Don't want? No, they are more than desperate.
When you stay static, the world moves forward, you will be left behind. If US decides not to move forward, then China would happily reap all the economical outcome for the years to come, and US would become poorer and jobs would go away too. It is indeed a myth that politics can fix this. No, it cannot. Conservative thinking that they can freeze the time by voting is fantasy. Growth is a game you have to participate, it is a capitalist world, after all. However, what politics could fix, is to solve the redistribution problem, to have more people share the pie, not a handy few.
And I would agree with you if they didn't have things like long work shifts that are almost mandatory, because they're not exactly happy as is.
They don't need to focus in growth, they could focus in improving their conditions, but instead it seems they're coasting aimlessly and no one is grabbing the steering wheel.
Then the country will die -- and in due time it might be taken to be a satellite to another power.
It's not about wanting to present their current way of life (as opposed to changing customs etc). They could be doing that and be still fine.
But they've already sacrificed quality of life over GDP (working themselves to death), and now they're also dying in numbers (not enough young people).
A huge percentage of Japanese young people don't want to have sex. We may want to understand what's going on in the national psychology.
BTW isn't Japan on the cutting edge of robotics and always has been? I remember dynamism.com website like 10 years ago.
But https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japan-sex-prob...
men: "Women are scary."
women: "Men are lazy, just into porn."
That sounds all too familiar :(
And by the way things go, it seems they froze in time. Nobody moves the country forward
Japan’s tech cannibalism saps Abenomics - https://www.ft.com/content/238c993c-427d-11e6-9b66-0712b3873... might need to Google it
Some other day I saw people complaining that in Japan they still use a mechanical mouse (not an optical one, the older ones)