alt Hacker NewsJapanese and American companies have different purposes.
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.
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Stability is preferred to growth in the moment, but in retrospect and in comparison to others most people don’t want to give up what they have and go back in time.
Stable income and employment feels like a distant 4th nowadays. Nothing feels stable.
>Japanese and American companies have different purposes. In Japan the corporation primarily provides stable income and employment for society,
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.
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> Most citizens would prefer stability to growth, but I think the tradeoff has a lot of downstream consequences.
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.