Byrne Hobart: belief

Transcript context

…gas and tires were hard to get, but people were still eating well whereas in a lot of other parts of the world people were literally going hungry so that their country could continue to fight the war. Maybe there's some level of hermetic response where you you suffer a bit because your country is contributing to this and then you're heartier for it and the country has accumulated a lot of social capital and you had to get really good at organizing and building things and then maybe there is some level of suffering from conflict where you've totally had enough and you're never doing anything like that ever again and you're just too done. I think one of the interesting things to consider is the extent to which different countries fit into that model. I'm very interested in Japan and Japanese industrial policy and how the Japanese post-war recovery went and one of the annoying things about that is that I thought the question was — How did Japan have this wonderful post-war recovery? But when you look at a lot of the institutions involved, they don't start in 1945 or 1951 or whatever. They actually started before World War II. So you can actually sort of see World War II as part of this arc of the same historical process that continued post-war which is Japan wanted to be economically self-sufficient and independent and a country that could determine its own fate and during the last gasp of imperialism, one way to do that was invade countries with lots of natural resources, take those resources and then manufacture things at home. But when that became untenable then the next best option was be within the sphere of influence of the most powerful military in the world and be very closely tied to their import and export markets and then import everything you need under the protection of the US military and then export things to the US in order to pay for those imports. Basically run the same strategy just with someone else during the military part. In one sense that was a total defeat of the imperialist model and in another sense it was this strategic realignment but actually basically the same end goal. Very different external facing view of that goal but same ultimate idea. There's a book called Princess of the Yen which is mostly about Japanese central banking policy but it has some early bits about how the structure of Japan's economy works. The way the author describes it is that post-war Japan had a war economy in peacetime with lots of centralized control, suppressed consumption, and lots of heavy industry, heavy manufacturing. The modern structure of a lot of companies in Japan dates back to the wartime period, sometimes the post-war period. This includes the biggest advertising agency in Japan that was apparently a wartime, or immediately pre-war, attempt to agglomerate all the smaller ad companies into one big more efficient company that would free up resources that could be used for building battleships and other stuff like that. So yeah, it's kind of the same story just being expressed in a bunch of different ways. ient company that would free up resources that could be used for building battleships and other stuff like that. So yeah, it's kind of the same story just being expressed in a bunch of different ways. I think you can look at other countries and try to see what threads of continuity there are between the pre-war and post-war order. Tony Judt's postwar book is a really phenomenal look at that question. In a lot of cases there's like there's a surprising level of continuity. There are some things that totally broke and had to be totally reformed and there are some things that just kept going exactly the way they've been going before. Everybody wants to be a first man but nobody wants to go on a diet. [Laughter] You've mentioned this line before but there's a line from How Asia Works where they're talking about the reparations that Korea got after World War Two from Japan and how they're using that to build up their industrial capacity and there's a line from one of the line managers in the factory who goes, “Listen you guys have to work 14 hours a day, seven days a week and the reason is this money is blood money. It's our blood. This money was gotten from ripping your mother and killing your father and if you can't use that money to rebuild our country, what good are you? You might as well just kill yourself.” I was reading about lean production before I interviewed Austin Vernon and in all these books, they're talking about how America was never able to replicate the productivity of Japanese lean production and it's just because you're talking about Americans who are trying to save up their pensions and working eight hours a day and have hour-long lunches and then you have these hardcore Japanese who just got through World War Two and barely survived. The thumos is completely different. You just can't replicate that in America.…

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