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It would be interesting to discover that some languages are less efficient than others, and what effect (if any) it has on the economy. I think Japanese probably is more complicated that English - so why does it not appear to slow them down? Or maybe it slows them down in some respect (maybe having to sacrifice a lot of childrens play time to rote learning?), and they compensate in other ways?

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I don't know about Japanese, but in Chinese, all the numbers have words that can be said extremely quickly - si, qi, etc. Because our working memory is implemented as a 2 second loop of audio, this allows Chinese people to have a working memory that's closer to 10 items instead of the famous 'seven plus or minus two' that English speakers have. In 'Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell posits this as part of the reason why asians often seem to be better at math.

Spoken Japanese may be less compressed than English, but written Japanese is considerably more terse.

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