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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

In modern Japanese factories, master craftsmen are referred to as kami-sama, gods. Not, you know, monotheistic or Olympian gods with pretensions to universality, but Shinto gods, the kind of god that might belong to the huge old tree that sticks out above the top of the forest. It's not a sarcastic title; the respect is real. Japanese companies are run by businessmen, just like companies in the US, but they still have to treat the makers with respect.

Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs. Karoshi is still a bigger problem than precarización, which is what we call the gig economy here in Argentina.

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> Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs.

Could be. Didn't stop the USSR from churning out heaping mounds of hot garbage, though.

It was more a result of bad planning and bad incentives. Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one.

Good companies mix both long term planning and reactive processes

> Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one.

The fundamental advantage of corporations over centrally planned states is not their time horizon, but our tolerance to allow them to go bankrupt.

Markets out perform voting by concentrating power in the hands of those who make good decisions (where "good" is defined by the market).

Arguably, that advantages companies that can hack that metric -- as anything they do to survive (politics) is treated as a reverse proxy for the value they bring to the market. This is why "too big to fail" and "job creator" became mantras.

My instinct here is that master craftspeople need a certain amount of autonomy to do good work, and if they are working for bosses, that requires high trust for the craftspeople on the part of the bosses. That trust was not present either in Fordism nor in the vulgar Soviet imitation of Fordism, but I think it is widespread in Japan. (I have never been inside a Japanese factory, though, so that is hearsay on my part.)

I suggest that perhaps one factor that makes this trust hard to achieve in the US today is the greater misalignment of incentives that comes with making the principal–agent relationship so temporary. But clearly that is not the only situation where trust could be low. I think we can agree that, despite Stakhanovite rhetoric, trust and autonomy was very low for most workers in the USSR, no?

(Also, the USSR did remarkably well at producing products considering the impoverished capital and skill basis it started from, and also considering the destruction of the German invasion. From the October Revolution to Sputnik was only 40 years: in two generations of bloody genocide, from a backward peasant society to world technological leadership.)

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