Or inversely, it's a western problem that makes it difficult to live humanely and stress-free and incurs great human toll -- and at the point when we're so technologically advanced to not need it as much (but are great at creating busywork for ourselves).
To write off the economic successes of the west under the guise of “problem” with western culture is deeply problematic. If you were to use this tableau to jump into an argument against societies that are captilistic and encourage the chasing of material wealth over the informal, beautiful moments that make humanity interesting you would have a much stronger case. I think we would all benefit if you were to sharpen your position, as there is something deeply intriguing about your point.
With that said, I also find issue with content of your argument. Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. A lack of punctuality that permeates a society to the point that it effects business strategy is problematic.
Well, there is a problem with western culture in this area -- it can never be content, and its eating away the planet. It's own visionaries and thought leaders imagined a society of leisure and 3 hour workdays and such, but we have many times the efficiency per hour of previous ages, and people are overworked more than ever (not to mention increasingly in debt as well).
>Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.
Well, I'm against "economic success" beyond a certain point, and especially when it comes to the detriment of the society, and the environment. I'm for economic sustainability, and with utilizing the vast technological resources to improve life (as opposed to induce consumption).
The problem of many Western societies is that the cost of leisure is too damn high for many.
This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster. So there is a range of maximum efficiency, which is hopefully far from 100 h/week, but also likely far from 10 h/week.
"Gig economy" can help: you work hard 2-4 months for a high rate, then coast 4-6 months at a nice place with low cost of living. The problem, of course, is that you must have saved a pretty thick cushion of assets for the case when a new gig is not coming when you planned.
I'd go further. Most products and projects are BS busywork, if not actively harmful and they shouldn't be part of the economy in the first place.
We've created a huge society middlemen, procurers, and snake-oil salesmen, and turned increasingly more aspects of life into commercial endeavours, where ever more people are constantly hustling and peddling something (manufactured crap, of which there are untold tons [1], planned obsolesce replacement products, their image, and so on).
Finding such toxic-but-still-used product is a good opportunity to both make a living and improve life in general. I suppose the hardest part is to detect and understand the real need being filled.
Certainly enough, education, and other ways to change culture, is a more profound way to change the way people fill their needs, and especially what they even perceive as needs. E.g. the need to serve a bloody revenge is by now mostly absent from a typical Western society, while the need to one-up a neighbor is still pretty widespread.
Well, I'm a believer in an objective world in which not all needs are equal.
I can accept that which need is important or not can be difficult to ascertain. But I also hold that in many, if not most, cases, it's very easy.
Despite the cult of the individual and the reverence with which subjective taste is held, I'd go on record to say that some (most) people have buy products that fulfill irrelevant non-needs.
For an easy to agree with (but real) example, heroin addicts ands Milli Vanilli listeners both buy products that "fill a need". The question is more whether they should.
If for some reason you prefer today's Western culture to that of 15th century, be certain that it changed mainly because of some people pursuing their irrelevant non-needs, as seen by then-contemporary "normal people".
You hasten to generalizations. It's entirely possible that the economic success of the Western societies had historic roots in the industrial revolution and the mechanization of human life it entailed. But it's very hard to prove the same reasons hold today - it might be the case where the historical effect is confused with the alleged cause.
The strong economic growth of countries like Brazil or South Africa seems to indicate that, at least to a point, economics can blend with a relaxed attitude. Modern technology, offline communications like email, telecommuting and just in time fabrication could well usher in an era of high prosperity and low stress. Maybe these countries are laboratories of the future.
Unfortunately, the people benefitting from the 'economic success' aren't the same people as those who are required to be efficient in everything.
It would be much better to look at quality of life than at profits. The only thing amounts of money have going for it is that you can easily put them in spreadsheets.
punctuality doesn't necessarily means efficiency. Punctuality itself comes at a cost. Somewhat similar to low latency. Your argument reminds about those Scrum proponents who tout that decreasing the latency and increasing synchronicity - what the Scrum is really about - would miraculously lead to throughput increase. Which it never does, and usually it has quite the opposite effect (exactly as expected from the systems theory and experience)
For example if you have 10 people attending a meeting and all must wait till they are present before starting (a very common occurrance) having all 10 people turn up promptly is more efficient than having 1-9 people waiting for the remainder of the attendees to arrive.
Have they ever looked up a store's hours before going there? Or gone to see a movie? Or met with someone else to do... anything? Or utilized public transit?
Of course it can be argued that, in a cosmic sense, maybe society is more "efficient" toward people relaxing and enjoying life if that train doesn't leave for another 45 minutes because the conductor felt like sleeping in this morning. But at that point, it's not a meaningful discussion.
Honestly it's difficult to imagine having the opposing view with any experience at all managing anything. Or even considering what it might be like to do so.
That automatically implies that it doesn't take much experience or a very open mind. It would be the opposite position, the hard to accept one, that would require broader life experience and a more open mind.
I think it would be better if meetings were seen as the expensive beasts they are and only the bare minimum of people that can attend it, should attend it, and it should be considered (especially with routine meetings) whether or not the meetings even need to be held in the first place.
Efficient towards what, and what for? Those are good questions seldom asked.
I'm not suggesting that everything in business benefits from being regimented but that meeting expectations allows for others to plan their time effectively.
Time where people are waiting for others to do work which should have been completed can often be wasted.
Then you must first consider the need to have the business or meeting in the first place.
In fact, people's time is only "wasted" because it has been made precious -- i.e. because it was stolen and/or sold. That's way more wasted time (they'll never get again) there, than in "wasting time" by not being punctual.
Societies studied by ethnologists had little care for punctuality. In fact the same was true for rural societies in Europe and the US as well (the US South was considered "lazy" and without a "sense of time" as well), and even urban life before the tyranny of the modern "always on" demands. For the upper classes, being fashionably late was a virtue.
Punctuality is a virtue of slaves -- to other people and to the clock in general.
On a longer time scale, it is hard when you look at Italy or Greece today to think of how the same population was once Sparta, the army of Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire. Populations evolve.
That's just nit-picking about the complexities of history, but I do agree that the point that people and cultures can change is very true!
The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and
men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation
to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first
opportunity.
The Party is a large part of the difference in culture. Taiwanese and Singaporeans are Chinese but they didn’t have the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward to deal with. Communism does bad things to cultures. I’m sure things will get better in time but I doubt it will be the work of just one generation.
Lee Kuan Yew famously fashioned Singaporean culture almost out of whole cloth as he believed that without a radical transformation in the social and economic culture that Singapore would quickly disintegrate. I can't find good quotes at the moment, but he had some really harsh opinions about the local ethnic Chinese culture from which he emerged; that it was corrupt, chaotic, criminal and an existential threat to the new nation.
I read Paul Midler's "What's Wrong With China" recently, the followup to his "Poorly Made In China", and his research seems to indicate that communism and the Great Leap Forward are not the source of those aspects of Chinese culture, that those aspects go back much further.
Definitely a fascinating read.
The Meiji Restoration was already incredible but I thought the work ethic was there throughout and helped make it possible. I had no idea there was also a revolution of work ethic.
They beat the Brits by about a decade.
Are you sure about that? Compulsory education was introduced in Austria in 1774. Apparently Japan introduced it shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. If anything the UK was particularly late to the game.
Austria had major attendance and implementation issues (e.g., only a 50-60% attendance rate) which apparently weren't fixed until the Reich Public School Law of 1869.
That said, I remember that there was a lot of discussion at one point about how individual behavior in countries that overlapped ex-Austrian/Habsburg territory could be mapped against historical (19th century) boundaries.
Getting back to the original point, Japan was successful because it had high levels of urbanization, which made state directed education more accessible and easier to attain. Other countries/territories implemented compulsory education well before Japan (e.g., Massachusetts first required compulsory education in the 1640s), but efforts either had comparatively lower penetration or relied on non-state institutions (e.g., the church or private institutions) to enforce.
There is correlation between stereotypes and GDP.
> passionate, melancholy, romantic, and tearful
https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-dixon/british-stiff-up...
After all some of the most famous Romantic artists came from Germany: Heine, Beethoven, Hölderlin and Goethe himself. The latter's Werther was the most emotional novel until at least Madam de Bovary, which was written about 80 years later.
Any links on this?
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...
TL;DR (it's a 213 page grad thesis) Old Germany used to be basically Hufflepuff, a simple-minded, loyal, obedient rustic bumbler who's too stupid to really be a threat or even much of a partner. New Germany arose post-German unification and especially post WW1, where the stereotypes shifted to the modern more sinister concept of a nation of amoral mad scientists and clockwork soldiers - largely as an attempt to justify Germany being the great rival of England.
I was hoping someone whose started a business in Brazil would come along and tell me what it's like. I really know nothing about the country.
Here's an interview with an industrialist that describes the transformation: http://blog.lucforsyth.com/2012/01/under-pressure-byun-ho-sa...
I think that time is not really a factor here. Institutions like the IMF and WTO passively suppress the economic development of poor countries by withholding incentives unless they behave like rich countries. I don't think this is done out of malice though, because I've met people who genuinely believe that forcing businesses in Mozambique to compete directly with the U.S. economies of scale "creates a level playing field" and doesn't inhibit their growth in certain key industries at all.
It's easy for someone to "genuinely believe" something when their career (as policy advisors, bankers, development "experts", etc) and perks is based upon promoting it and enforcing it upon others.
Without "skin in the game" everyone can be a good person with "great intentions".
One person, One vote is the least flawed way to gather signal from actual people who have skin in the game.
That's a generalization its opponents make, but it isn't true.
In most places where it was practiced (ancient Athens, short-lived anarchist areas in Spain, egalitarian communities, etc.) it was shown to be more benevolent and inclusive to "true numerical minorities" than most representative democracies. Heck, the US had segregation in practice up to the 70s, with blacks being a 20% or so of the population (and more in some areas), and gays were persecuted throwout Europe representative democracy or not.
Even more, the most horrid persecutions of minorities have happened under elected representatives (like Hitler), or authoritarian regimes (e.g. Stalin), as opposed to any "direct democracy".
It's indicative that the arguments in the lemma ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority ) are contrived though experiments and not historical examples.
There's no "tyranny of the majority" that's inherent in direct democracy, any more so than it is in representative "democracy". The tyranny lies in an orthogonal axis (namely: the prevalent passions and ideologies of the era), and can be applied regardless of direct or representative democracy.
Source? Athenian direct democracy was only for males, legally sanctioned slaves and allowed for a simple majority to ostracize people. Sparta's direct democratic elements oversaw a large Helot slave population.
That's irrelevant to the discussion though, as that was simply the norm then across regimes, not a special characteristic of Athenian direct democracy.
Not to mention that the US representative democracy was only for males until the 1920s, had slaves until 1865 and segregation until the 1970s. And that's 2.5 millennia later than that pesky Athenian direct democracy.
You claimed "in most places where [direct democracy] was practiced (ancient Athens... etc.) it was shown to be more benevolent and inclusive to 'true numerical minorities' than most representative democracies." I'm disagreeing with that claim. I'm asking for a source for the the general claim because I'm confused about what separates "true numerical minorities" from other kinds of minorities.
I'm pushing back on the assertion that is has been shown direct democracy works well for minorities. It hasn't. (It has been shown that representative democracy works, or at the very least can be stable.) The tyranny of the majority has not been conclusively proven (nor disproven). This is an open question, and one that evolves as technology (and the population's education) progresses.
You can disagree, but not because ancient Athens had slaves or women didn't vote. That were common places until millennia later across systems of government, and not some inherent product of direct democracy (as opposed to representative democracy).
If you want to disagree, let's stick to differences in how the citizenry included or excluded in both is treated.
By definition, something found in both types of democracy (such as slavery or women not voting) wont tells us anything about how they differ.
>I'm asking for a source for the the general claim because I'm confused about what separates "true numerical minorities" from other kinds of minorities.
Nothing. I didn't chose the term "true numerical minorities" -- I just used the grandparent's (ff317) term.
Ignoring history of how stolen wealth from colonialism and protectionist policies of the west during the colonial era etc when its convenient to do so is nothing but malice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
President Ulysses S. Grant stated:
For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, Gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.
It is not done with malice.
The IMF/WB believe that nations that have basic infrastructure, basic forms of democracy, low corruption and relatively open markets ... will be successfull. This is neither malicious nor entirely naive.
It's pragmatically naive when you consider the leader of some nation may take a 10% cut off the loan, hire his buddies to 'build the dam that never gets built' and then of course you have a nation in debt ... but those debts are not advantageous to the West at all, so the conspiracy theories are wrong.
Now - where there is actual malice is when a large, Western industrial conglomerate might win a big contract and so they influence, bribe, fake data - and then get the contract to 'totally overbuild' some kind of capacity leaving a nation with way more than they need. That's malice, but it's definitely not the IMF/WB or lending nations that win there.
Many of EU & IMF bureaucrats genuinely believed that they were helping the Greek economy recover while they were actually engaged in destroying it.
And no the Greeks destroyed their own economy though systematic hard and soft corruption, knowingly hiding irregularities, unwillingness to make any necessary reforms, etc. etc..
The IMF's 'dogma' operates under the assumption that there are conscientious, reasonable and rational actors on the other side of the loan.
One might argue that it is this assumption that needs to be revisited ... though what some lament as 'austerity' (required by lenders) to others simply is 'being responsible with the massive loan we are about to take'.
If you are assigning moral faults, then please do so for the banks too who made their loans knowing the facts & assuming that they would be bailed out by EU if things went bad.
A more rational thing to do would have been to force the banks to grant Greece a debt haircut, waiving off 50% of the loans, while helping Greece restructure its economy in a realistic manner.
Instead, many people especially at the EU saw the Greek economic problems as a moral failure of all the Greek people for which all of them, including pensioners, must be punished while safely bailing out the banks that originally lent. Somehow, it is unacceptable to blame the banks.
I doubt this. The ECB and EU have not ever done this, and thinking through it just for a minute means that this is highly unlikely. I can't fathom why anyone would actually think this is going to happen with any degree of certainty. But I get the impetus that 'way back in the 2000's' that people might have 'felt this way'.
Also - there's a lot of fault still on the side of the Greeks in this case.
It’s happened before in history and even has a name: debt bondage.
“Repetition is the mother of all learning”
"Why Brazilians are always late"
Always being late, and always being late to parties are too very different accusations. If you just read the new headline ("In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party") and checked comments before reading TFA, you might be confused.
This excerpt appears in Ha-Joon Chang's book "Bad Samaritans" and it was written by an Australian consultant with regards to Japan in August 1915. Chang also mentions Sidney Gulick's 1903 book "Evolution of the Japanese" which also stereotypes the Japanese as "'easy-going' and 'emotional' people who possessed qualities like 'lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.'"
I don't have details on Brazil, but I am almost certain that this "Brazilian time" is just a symptom of some completely reversible, systemic problem that is making it difficult to do business with high-technologies in Brazil.