Comments by "Snack Plissken" (@snackplissken8192) on "Why Japan Could Rise Again as an Economic Super-Power" video.

  1. Another major contributing factor to both the economic stagnation and the inability to reform the work culture is the Zaibatsu system. The Zaibatsus are so big that if they collapse, they will take vast swaths of the Japanese economy with them. This means that politicians and financial institutions are blackmailed into keeping them afloat, no matter how poorly run they are. This prevents the business cycle from weeding out business leaders, bad business practices, and bad businesses in general. This also means that there are a lot of incentives to create regulations that throttle the entry of small startups, starve them of capital, or to force them to join an existing conglomerate. If foreign investment goes right into the Zaibatsus then nothing will change, but I can't imagine Japan allowing foreign companies to get around the rules that have stagnated their domestic industries. But what incentive structure would cause Japanese politicians to risk the collapse of domestic industry in order to let zombie companies die and force painful reforms whose benefits won't be felt in the next election cycle or two?
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