Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Japanese apparently aren’t suehappy. Not yet, anyway. It’s hard to feel sorry for the lawyers.

Japan already has a system that works, though, at least for consumer product stuff. The head of the transgressing company is publicly humiliated (which is a much bigger deal to a Japanese person). He gets in front of the camera and bows and scrapes and cries until the victims are satisfied.

The bureaucracy is incredibly powerful – you wouldn’t be too far wrong to say politics is mostly a side show, and the real power is in the bureaucracy. It’s the bureaucracy that makes sure everyone plays their parts.

* There is a good old independent movie called Let’s Kill All The Lawyers that specifically mentions Japan having (at the time) far more gardeners than lawyers as proof of their societal harmony.

* Japan has idle lawyers, homogeneity and low crime. Syrians, Sudanese, and Afghanis can solve all three “problems.” Sounds to me like a match made in heaven.

* My brother lives in Japan. Years ago, he was visiting me and I had “The McLaughlin Group” on, with all the panelists shouting over each other as usual. I asked my brother if they had shows like that in Japan. He said, “No, in Japan most people pretty much agree on everything.”

Of course, the Yakuza provide certain services that otherwise might be handled by attorneys, like persuading a homeowner to sell a property that a developer has his eye on.

* ‘Undercover Economist” Tim Harford in the FT admits that against the received wisdom of economists Trump is right that free trade can be highly destrutive. But like a good economist he alludes to Ricardo and conveniently ignores the notion that China et al might be engaged in industrial scorched earth policies designed to lock in long-term dominance.

“Fifteen years ago, the conventional economic wisdom was that free trade was almost unambiguously a good idea. Here’s the basic logic. There are two ways for the British to get hold of wine. We can grow and press our own grapes, or we can make something that the French want and trade with them. If we’re good at making, say, computer games and the French are good at making wine, then trading is the better way to get what we want.

The idea that we might, Trumpishly, “beat the French in trade” sounds appealing but is incoherent. And while a British Sanders might point to the loss of jobs in the UK wine industry, that would miss the gains in the software industry. There is little economic difference between a tariff on the import of French wine and a tariff on the export of British software…

“In the long run, of course, that adjustment will happen — just as we have adjusted to the decline of agricultural labour or the need for typewriter repairs. But the long run is longer than many economists feared. It is easy to see why supporters of Trump and Sanders have run out of patience.”

http://timharford.com/

Harford quotes a paper “The China Shock” by Dorn et al that notes that imports from China caused 2.4 million Americans to lose their jobs between 1999 and 2011, adding that this figure was likely too low.

That gloomy paper closes brightly by suggesting that as China moves up into being a Middle Income country rising labour costs will undercut its exporting prowess. Nowhere does the paper discussed China’s multilayered resistance to imports, its coordinated dumping actions and the widely accepted national policy of de facto mercantilism in regards the outside world.

* I love how they have the gall to keep printing stories about how terrible it is that rentier types like developers, landlords and lawyers have it in Japan as if the average person in the West looks at this as anything other than a utopia. Maybe lower house prices and higher wages due to lower labour supply will spur Japanese people to start families earlier, both reducing the generation time and leading to higher TLF for women. Maybe Japanese people could take more time off (Like something resembling the working hours of a human rather than say a printer) and have time to start relationships?

* Several years ago, there was an upsurge in the number of labor cases (e.g., wrongful termination or reduction in hours, wages etc.) brought in Japan. The Japanese responded with a specialized system of labor arbitration panels. If Japanese lawyers have too little work, perhaps that system succeeded. As a general rule, the only people who make money in courts are lawyers–it’s almost always better to settle things, especially commercial disputes, amicably between the parties.

* I work with the Japanese and do see they stay working very late. In my experience, no one will leave the office until their manager leaves.

More on point, Japanese are extremely non-litigious. And more and more of the M&A work there consists of Japanese firms buying non-Japanese assets, and foreign firms are used for those deals. The Japanese also use non-lawyer specialized professionals to do a great deal of the work done in the US by lawyers (scriveners and IP professionals).

* In a society where people view themselves as part of a whole, they don’t attack each other.

In a society where people view their family as distinct from the mass of society and not part of it, there is a lot of litigation.

In completely unrelated news, Jews are a large percentage of lawyers in the U.S.

In other completely unrelated news, the stereotype of the Irish-conman-lawyer was once common in the late 19th and early 20th c. America, only to disappear as the mass of Irish moved into the middle and upper classes.

* Chrysler Corporation used to own 30% of the stock of Mitsubishi and had to sell it off during the early 90s when the country was in recession and they came very close to bankruptcy (their bonds were junk rated).

I remember reading articles about the meetings between the Chrysler and Mitsubishi management and how the Japanese were amazed at how the US management wanted everything locked down tightly in contracts while the Japanese were more willing to agree on general principles and if there was a conflict negotiate to come to some mutual agreement.

One is a screw-you-any-chance-I-can mentality and the other is more of a give and take for mutual benefit mentality.

* Last year the WSJ reported that the Japanese government was forcing all 86 public universities to downsize their liberal arts programs and add more business and vocational programs.

This article mentions an increase in child custody cases. Afaik, Japan does not recognize dual custody and the police and government don’t want to get involved in disputes. Perhaps the custody cases are being filed by bewildered foreigners like the ones in this video.

* Dear Japan, you are obviously doing a lot of things right. If you feel the feedback you are getting from the West is incoherent and backwards – you are correct. Disregard all advice from the NY Times crowd. We are stuck in it’s muck and trying to recover.

* Sweden used to have similar problems. Lots of rape counselors, policemen, judges with nothing to do. These are booming professions now.