And in the long-term, people start fleeing the "stable" countries for already-grown ones.
Are you Japanese? Because this doesn't match what I know about Japanese companies, like Sony for example, who operate in a very American way.
Your image on Japanese vs American companies feels like the copy and pasted idealistic impression of what American redditors imagine Japanese companies would be like, rather than reality.
I don't know if it really applies to the current thread, but I just wanted to point out that POSIWID is certainly not a vapid, empty concept.
People want personal stability, which in our current society means a stable job.
That doesn't have to be the case, though.
Overall, economic growth is good for society as a whole, so it makes sense that a state should encourage it as much as it can.
This means that what is good for an individual is not the same as what is good for society.
I think the ideal solution would be to keep the risk-taking in business that you need for good growth, and instead provide stability through strong social support services, like healthy unemployment insurance or UBI. That way, everyone can take risks to try to drive the economy forward, but not starve if things go poorly.
The problem with basing the language in the aggregate, is implies that distribution doesn’t matter, and all modern economic models agree. This is a big problem for the reality of people living in ever increasing inequality. Money is a competitive resource, we use it to bid for real resources. If constant economic growth disproportionately goes to the already wealthy, it worsens inequality when resources to exploit become more scarce. It’s one thing to have massive swaths of untouched natural world to exploit for human benefits, but those days are long gone IMO.
(A worse issue is that inequality decreasing can mean things are getting worse for everyone.)
Economic growth means resources get more plentiful.
If you have a very fair distribution of a very small productive output, everyone will be miserable because they don’t have enough to live. At the same time, producing a ton that only goes to a select few will also leave most people miserable.
We don’t want to go to either extreme. We want to find the best way to foster productivity while making sure everyone benefits from that productivity.
My suggestion is that you get the best of both by letting competition and innovation be rewarded, while also taking care of the ‘losers’ in that competition.
It took me a minute to figure out the typo ("depraved" instead of "deprived")
Japan compares much better to the US in terms of how much wealth the top 1% control. 24.6% vs 34.8% according to https://wid.world
Graph here: https://imgur.com/a/UwWvaHW
I do think there will have to be large changes soon.
American CEOs are on the board of 8 companies but spend 5 minutes a year combined at the offices of those companies. They spend their weekends at private islands off the coast of the US Virgin Islands with other billionaires. They fire employees who ask for health care benefits or a day off. They actively endorse political candidates who went to the same private island with them and who will lengthen working hours, reduce benefits, and make it easier to fire employees. They want global surveillance to track anyone who's ever even considered saying anything bad about them. When it's possible to inject ads directly into our brains, those CEOs will force their employees to do it.
As an American who's been in Japan for a very long time and worked at Japanese companies, Japanese companies don't pay big bucks, but there are fewer deranged ultra rich people within them.
At the biggest ones you start to see branches of the organisation dedicated to c level services... Things like a driver awake and ready to go 24/7 (for the whole family), purchasing or even building apartments.
All available in the west, but the distinction is who directly pays for these things.
In Japan the corporation primarily provides stable income and employment for society, and secondarily returns on capital invested. In America, corporations primarily provide returns on capital invested and secondarily provide stable income and employment.
This shows up in the data too. Japanese corporations are less likely to go out of business but provide worse investment returns. American corporations provide better investment returns, but the citizens have to deal with layoffs.
Most citizens would prefer stability to growth, but I think the tradeoff has a lot of downstream consequences.