Name: Is Japan the Perfect Nation?
Uploaded: 2020-05-02T08:45:02.000Z
Duration: 12 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Back when I was still learning Japanese,  I used to turn on the news at night

so I could try to up my  language comprehension skills.

Adverbs of degree

After work, I'd turn on the tv, I'd sit down  with my dinner and I'd just try to parse out

One night, after the weather and the perp walks and the general BS, they brought on an interview

For the first time, I understood  a full Japanese conversation.

Or, at the very least, a single back and forth.

The interviewer was a government minister and the newscaster turned to him and said:

“With our population declining, and our economy stagnant we really only have two choices.

We can either build better robots  or we can let in immigrants.”

And they turned to each other and laughed.

The minister repeated the word back to him.

Today's story is about Japan, and if I'm being honest, it's also about America.

But more than that, it's about those  damn immigrants.

To the anti-immigration crowd, Japan is  often treated as the example country.

As the place where they are doing it right.

Because it essentially means that  they're praising their ideological enemies,

But in that misunderstanding, I think we can see a highlighting of one of the biggest problems

Which is that identity is no longer supported by its natural, economic backing.

People are so quick online to send an angry tweet that I don't think they are really looking at

And it's going to blow up in all of our faces.

And not just for the successes of its post-war boom, but also the successes of its bust.

Over the past 27 years, the Japanese economy has only grown at less than a 1% rate annually.

That's less than a 1/3rd that  of the United States.

That's the lowest of any  modern industrialized nation.

And yet, Japanese workers  haven't fallen behind.

They've made just as much money  as their American counterparts,

and if you exclude the top ten percent of earners,  they've overtaken them.

When presented in the form of total assets, they're actually nearly double.

And it isn't just a lack of frivolous spending.

Despite being hyper-capitalist on paper,  you wouldn't be far off to call Japan socialist.

After all, what is socialism if not  what they've achieved here?

They divide their wealth incredibly well.

Better than virtually any  other country on the planet.

They have a near one-party state and yet, it still invests back into the economy

to the point that their unemployment rate  remains below 2%.

They've got an incredibly successful form of universal  healthcare, one which genuinely concerns itself

with the long-term health of its citizens,  and in turn they're among

Income inequality is among the lowest on earth.

Japan has less than a third the  poverty rate of the United States,

In this being case defined as having assets under ten thousand and over a million, respectively.

Infant mortality, literacy rates, homelessness, crime rates, and so much more

The only problem is, without growth,  all of this is unsustainable.

To maintain their system, Japan has seen  an eye-watering 236% debt-to-GDP ratio.

And while much of the money has been taken out in publicly held yen, and is therefore more easily managed

than that of the foreign held debt,  it will still be their own undoing.

The amount of interest paid per year is staggering, and yet another cause of their economic stagnation.

To put it simply, they need more workers.

People cannot get an annualized salary increase if there's no money to increase it with.

You can't employ 98% of your workers if you don't have the money to pay them.

But before I say more about Japan, I want to take a little swipe at the US.

Because they're the ones that I find to be  spreading the most misinformation

I want to split the concept into three categories, intentional immigrants, illegal immigrants, and refugees.

Because they're all different, and have entirely different effects on the economy.

And in turn, from a purely economic standpoint, the people supporting them should be rather

By which I mean that you believe workers in your  society should be taken care of first and foremost.

You believe that unemployment should be low, union should be strong, and wealth should be

Well, then there is one group that  you should support.

Statistically, at least in the West, an intentional  immigrant will cause more wealth

They have a higher rate of entrepreneurship, and create more jobs than they fill in.

In turn, they are a great source of tax revenue.

They have, to put it simply, a positive effect on the total growth rate, unemployment

At best, their positive effect is questionable, and for it to work to the local people's benefit

entirely depends on how strong the system's desire is to spread that wealth.

It can work, but it's a much harder sell with many  more pitfalls and an easier target for animosity.

Certainly, they cause growth,  but growth to what end?

In effect, it becomes a moralistic choice.

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Is Japan the Perfect Nation?

incredibly

individual

pretend

positive