I'm Really Starting To Worry For The Japanese People. ( Archived) (18)

Don't worry for Japan
You may grieve for their current suffering, but there's no need to worry for their long term outlook.
At least not as far as the quake, the tsunami and even the exploding nuclear plants are concerned.

Japanese people are highly educated.
Compared to them most American - and even some European - people are just buddy scratching dimwits.

Sorry to put it so bluntly, but there's a reason for the record breaking suicide rate amongst Japanese high school students.
The pressure to succeed they're under is relentless.

Japanese infrastructure is likewise well developed, they've got the machinery required to allow their engineers to succeed.

And on top of all that, their culture strongly emphasizes the common good over the individuals quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Just the opposite of the American culture, which is one of the reasons why in the US everyone tends to be on his own in such a catastrophe (see New Orleans).

So Japan will recover from this disaster.

But the much greater problem they face of an ever aging population and a sky high public deficit, that one they will not get rid of as easily.

As the high deficit necessitates higher taxes, which in turn discourage the raising of large families in an educated populous, which in turn causes an ever bulging overhead of old people, which finally cause sky high government expenditures for social,medical and welfare services


In other words, if the Japanese would be less educated, they would have less problems in the long term, but a harder time to recover from natural disasters (see Haiti).