I was listening to this awesome interview with Tyler Cowen by Rick Rubin on Tetragrammaton this morning. Tyler has this staggering ability to sum up history, cogently, and on the fly- better than ChatGPT could ever. What I didn’t know was that Tyler has spent a lot of time travelling and seeing different nations economic development first hand. He seems to enjoy actually visiting the economies he studies, talking to the people on the ground and seeing what’s true for himself. So he talks about being in Japan then and now and I thought this was such a great description of my experience there (and more recently my experience of Italy felt the same):
“The first time I went to Japan, it felt like the future. It was the most exciting place I had been. This was sort of at the peak of the boom years.
And you go there now, it feels like an old folks home, which does an amazing job catering to tourists. So it's still fun, but it's lost the sense of thrill. It feels like a very gracefully managed decline, done perfectly, that the whole world will envy, but a decline nonetheless.”
My dad and I riding the train to the fish market in Japan in 2012
This is what I often forget about Japan when I envy their culture- the respect for tradition and craft, the orderliness of the people, and the appreciation and patience for excellence in everything. I forget that, for reasons I won’t pretend to fully understand, it isn’t working in very basic economic terms for them.