Why do you think Korea/Japan/Taiwan so outpaced West when it comes to technology, computers, and gadgets over the last few decades. I read somewhere that it was because of the 1973 oil crisis, which made those countries switch from heavy industry to technology. But why all the better phones, tvs, etc… ?
None of those three countries would be considered Southeast Asia. Japan, Taiwan and Korea are East Asia. Southeast Asia contains countries like Singapore, Viet Nam and Indonesia.
Anyway, I think that your premise is incorrect. They are no more advanced than we are in terms of gadgets. The iPhone, for example, came from the U.S. and that’s probably the hottest gadget out there right now.
I think it has partly something to do with the fact that from the 50’s into the 80’s, these were emerging countries that were exploited by the greater industrial powers (primarily the USA) for their cheap but high quality labor force. As their economies grew from the influx of jobs, technology, and money, they learned the technologies and the business aspects of the game, eventually becoming better at it than us. Couple that with their work ethic and emphasis on research and innovation, versus our corporate culture of profits above all, and it’s not hard to see why these countries have become so good at it. Someone else will be along shortly to say this much more eloquently than I have.
I see the same thing happening with China eventually.
When you have a brand-new technology like transistors or microprocessors, where no one has established preeminency yet, it’s easier for newcomers to get in on the ground floor. Japan especially had the advantage of being virtually as modern and industrialized as the west, and after WW2 solid-state electronics were a prime area to invest in. As said upthread, they had a labor force which was as educated as the west, but cheaper. China’s chance will come when The Next Big Thing- practical nanotechnology or genetic manipulation perhaps- gives them the chance to establish themselves as leaders in a brand new area.
In the 1980s, Japan revolutionized upper level management. Before the railroads in the US, there was really no need for upper level management, everything was done on a much smaller scale. However, in the 1980s, Japan realized they needed to do things differently, and instituted some practices that allowed their industry to thrive. Toyota is a gleaming example of this change, as they are still front runners because of their practices 25 years ago.
Modern fabrication plants cost a fortune. By around 1990, a modern one cost a gargantuan fortune. But each new improved fab was an order of magnitude more productive and capable of making much higher quality chips. Americans were heavily invested in fabs from the 70’s and early 80’s. But along the way, the Japanese got their hands of ludicrous amounts of capital (probably from the government, but it was never clear), down sometimes to having multiple independant research teams for different but related products. American chip manufacturers couldn’t compete with that; they simply didn’t have the capital. Instead, they started moving from memories into, say, processors (Intel did this). Other companies found their own niches or perished.
The Japanese, by the way, got hoist in their own petard. The Taiwanese screwed them over in mucyh the same way they knifed the Americans (building new fabs). The Chinese haven’t and probably won’t do the same to the Taiwanese, but someone will.
Second, the Japanese are oddly gadget-crazy. While their gizmos aren’t any more high-tech than ours, they do seem prone to more faddish behavior regarding them, often hugely buying into rther silly peices of tech, or making use of them in a somewhat tacky way (most such items vanish a years later, too).
To give you an idea of how much a fab cost, BTW, I believe I read that a modern fab in 1990 cost over 2 billion dollars. Yes, with a B.
Although they do have their advances they hardly own the market in Tech/comp (Intel, Microsoft, Ipods/Apple, Nvidia, ATI etc…)
They are nations with an average IQ well above…average.
Go to the library and check out The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. The book won’t answer your question exactly, but it gives some insight on the fast-paced advancement of Asian countries over the past two decades.
Is this true? Which are the dullard nations then?
The OP’s premise is incorrect. As smiling bandit says, they don’t have better technology–they just have better technology in a few specific arenas that they obsess over. Which of course explains the reason for those advances.
Japan has the best small LCDs for cell-phones and Samsung and Toshiba are duking it out to miniaturise hard drives and flash drives. But outside of those two realms of technology, Japan and Korea aren’t significantly ahead of the US in electronics for the most part, and the US is catching up very fast.
Japan also essentially wasted the brief advantage they had in those arenas. Cellphones, MiniDisks, etc. they’ve come up with a few technologies where they had a clear advantage over everything in the US (and Europe) but never made any real push to go international. MiniDisks had their 10th anniversary before Sony finally started advertising the things in the US, just to have MP3 players with internal hard drives introduced into the same market within a few months by American companies. And the same thing with cellphones. Three years ago they could have taken over the market, and instead they’ve ended up as just a parts supplier to Apple.
I’d like to tie these two excellent observations together with one of my own: Legendary quality gurus Deming and Juran tried to market their Total Quality Management concepts in the US, to companies like GM and Ford, and were roundly brushed off (at least, according to legend). But their ideas found a welcoming audience in postwar Japan, where Toyota adopted and modified TQM to develop its own Kaizen quality management technique. So the quote about a prophet in his own country rather comes to mind.
I can’t speak for work ethic (I’m posting from my office, after all), but there may be a less altruistic aspect to this. Corporate profits in Japan are taxed at a very high rate, which is a big incentive for companies to use up all their profits by re-investing in capital, buying the newest equipment, renovating all the factories, etc., before they go on the year-end books as taxable profits. Looking at our company’s balance sheets, you’d think we keep hitting the most unbelievable string of bad luck every year: every time, steady profits for the entire year, then something always happens in November to wipe out everything we’ve gained!’ Since our industry (advertising) doesn’t depend on cutting-edge technology, that ‘something’ is employee bonuses, so I’m sure not complaining.
If the tax rates were more profit-friendly, I don’t know of any aspect of the Japanese psyche that would preclude going for the cash. After all, my workplace is 90% Japanese, and we’re all thrilled when profits are as high as possible.
Take the Japanese, they are short. So their eyes are closer to the electronic components than many other nationalities. Caucasians are too tall and gangly. Their eyes are too far from integrated circuits. That’s why Sony products are better.
Sony - because caucasians are just too damn tall!
I think that explains it.
Crazy People, right?
I think there is something to the notion that not having older infrastructure makes a place more modern. take cellphones-a lot of countries are simply not building wired phone networks-they use wireless. Many countries were devasted by WWII-so they built over with the latest technology. We , on the other hand, are stuck with olde infrastructure, which we cannot afford to replace. Think about bridges-a substantial number in the USA are over 60 years old. It would be better to tear them down and replace them, but that is too costly
That may be a piece of the puzzle, but it’s hard to imagine that there’s much of an IQ gap between North Koreans and South Koreans.
It definitely takes a bright population plus a culture which tends toward consumerism so that there is a market for the gadgets and a drive to develop and supply them. N Korea has folk bright enough to make nuclear weapons but a culture/political milieu crummy enough to prevent the same bright people from making consumer-oriented technology.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations is as good as any place to start if you want to see collected statistics on “the dullard nations” (your choice of words) as well as other nations.
See those national IQ estimates here: IQ and the Wealth of Nations - Wikipedia along with some comments around them.
I think it’s only possible for your country to have an average IQ above the world average if you are acting as the brain drain destination for your part of the world. The USA certainly is. I’ve heard that part of the problem for Puerto Rico is that so many people with the ideas and the drive to help the economy move to America, already having American passports (right?), which creates a catch-22 for the PR economy.
Of course, what we really mean by IQ most of the time is the performance on an IQ test, which is really an assessment of what kind of things the person has been taught to do. It’s in large part a test of the education the testee has had. In this case, maybe S. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan test out well above world average. I tutored immigrant Taiwanese students whose parents were very bothered about the “lax” American schools. “Out at 3:00! And you don’t go at all on Saturday! What a waste of time!”