[HN Gopher] Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding
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Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding
Author : m463
Score : 24 points
Date : 2025-05-23 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| alephnerd wrote:
| Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that
| shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed
| countries at the time, was around 160% the average salary a
| Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0]
|
| A similar relative difference didn't seem to exist in the Canada
| (which I'm using to extrapolate for the US) around that time [1].
|
| It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work
| in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan.
| Essentially, shipbuilding in Japan in the 50s and 60s would have
| been the equivalent of being a Software Engineer in the US today,
| and it was treated as an engineering/STEM disciple [2] instead of
| as a blue collar semi-skilled discipline in the US.
|
| I can safely say a similar trend happened in South Korea in the
| 1970s-80s as well according to one of my professors back in the
| day who specifically specialized in Korea and Japan policy and
| advised Hyundai and Samsung back then, which lead to a similar
| decrease in shipbuilding capacity in Japan.
|
| Unsurprisingly, this trend can be seen to this day in any
| industry - be it chip design, VFX, battery manufacturing, etc.
|
| I've noticed a similar trend in distributed
| systems/infra/os/networking/cybersecurity as well, where American
| schools skip teaching systems or architecture fundamentals in
| order to overindex on Theory/Applied Math whereas NAND-to-Tetris
| is the default philosophy in programs in Israel, India, and the
| CEE.
|
| [0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602
|
| [1] -
| https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statc...
|
| [2] -
| https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japan...
| palmotea wrote:
| > Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact
| that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to
| developed countries at the time, was around 160% the median
| salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0]
| ... It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to
| work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan.
|
| It would be interesting to use wage and salary controls to
| drive talented workers out of certain industries and into more
| productive ones. For instance, cap total compensation and
| benefits for people working in advertising (including adtech)
| at say, $130k/year. People working on cryptocurrency could be
| capped at 2x minimum wage. It's sometimes hard to identify
| industries that should be supported, but it seems like it would
| be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but
| problematic industries.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful
| of well-compensated but problematic industries
|
| That would only incentivize a brain drain. A good example of
| this is software engineering in UK, Germany, Canada, South
| Korea, and Japan, as SWE salaries in those countries are not
| significantly different compared to other vocations.
|
| Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of
| the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-
| Tetris level knowledge, and it did help subsidize the GPU
| buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost
| effectively.
|
| You can't "command economy" innovation - it can only be
| nudged.
|
| The solution I've seen most industrial planners use is
| provide tax holidays and subsidizes for targeted industries,
| as this helps reduce the upfront cost of hiring, and does
| give wiggle room to raise compensation. Linking that with
| production, timeline locks, or even tariffs tends to help
| force an ecosystem to develop - which is what Japan used to
| build their shipbuilding and automotive industries in the
| post-war era.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one
| of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes
| NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge,
|
| And what does it do with that knowledge?
|
| > and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made
| foundational models easier to train cost effectively.
|
| Crypto and AI both use GPUs, but I'm not under the
| impression that AI people repurposed old crypto mines for
| anything (e.g. crypto mines used janky racks of consumer
| GPUs, AI typically uses specialized high-end equipment).
| alephnerd wrote:
| > And what does it do with that knowledge?
|
| Notice how I talked about HPC, distributed systems, and
| cybersecurity in my comment?
|
| > I'm not under the impression that AI people repurposed
| old crypto mines for anything
|
| The crypto boom helped incentivize the scaling out of GPU
| design and fabrication, just like how video games helped
| with the first iteration in the 2000s.
|
| There's a reason the concept of "dual use technology" has
| gained currency
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be
| supported,
|
| It's sometimes controversial to claim this industry or that
| industry should be pursued at a national level, but this
| isn't the same thing as _difficult_. It 's just that politics
| gets in the way.
|
| And yes, shipbuilding should be one of those industries we
| pursue.
|
| For that matter, I think you may have nailed the one industry
| we should punish.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Japan, Korea, and China kind of did this, but not via direct
| wage and salary controls. Window guidance is the informal
| practice where government/finance officials tell banks which
| industries to prefer for loans.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance
|
| It only really works where capital markets are undeveloped or
| heavily restricted; and it does starve out the rest of the
| economy, which is bad for the not-chosen-few (e.g. South
| Korea's chaebols) and can also backfire if you end up being
| bad at picking winners.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Window guidance doesn't have a great correlation with wage
| power, as was seen with the loss of shipbuilding capacity
| in Japan in the 1980s to South Korea as wages rose leading
| to automation (remember the whole Japanese "robots" trend).
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The ongoing narrative in the EU is that the State shouldn't get
| involved in the Economy - chiefly among the "liberal economics"
| parties.
|
| That should take a good look at this.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I've never seen a convincing explanation from the laissez-faire
| neoliberal crowd how their view of the world squares with the
| fact that _all_ the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China,
| South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state
| intervention. They generally handwave it away and try to change
| the subject as quickly as possible.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| "At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the
| world's ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%"
| dumdedum123 wrote:
| That's an interesting take. I read the article and it sounds like
| the US invented modern shipbuilding during WW2, and the Japanese
| just copied it and ran with it. But ok.
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