Japanese life expectancies by age and gender, 1990 to 2013

LE by Age in japanese males

LE by Age in japan

via Life Expectancy by Age in selected Country from 1990 to 2013 | Health Intelligence.

The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are buying up our land! What has @NZGreens to say about that?

Canada was the largest source of foreign investment during the period, as its pension fund bought 18 properties in a portfolio from AMP and increased its stake in Kaingaroa Forest.

Japan surrendered today

Japan’s population is set to fall 32% by 2060

The Power of Propaganda and the Japanese Empire

The quote of Schuler is an excellent summary of the difficulty of bringing a war to an end rather than give time to regroup and attack again.

Brandon Christensen's avatarNotes On Liberty

Economist Kurt Schuler has a fascinating post on the various currencies that were used in mainland East Asia during World War II over at the Free Banking group blog.

Unfortunately, there are three paragraphs in the post that attempt to take libertarians to task for daring to challenge both the narrative of the state and the narrative of the nation regarding that horrific reminder of humanity’s shortcomings. He is writing of the certainty of the US’s moral clarity when it came to fighting Japan (the post was published around Pearl Harbor remembrance day):

The 1940 U.S embargo of certain materials frequently used for military purposes was intended to pressure Japan to stop its campaign of invasion and murder in China. The embargo was a peaceful response to violent actions. Japan could have stopped; it would have been the libertarian thing to do. For libertarians to claim that the embargo was…

View original post 1,475 more words

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing

Squeamishness kills alert: were the atomic bombings unnecessary? Would have Japan surrendered anyway?

https://twitter.com/makingdayscount/status/629162313879154688

https://twitter.com/historyfacts247/status/629304405024763904

https://twitter.com/AmericanVet3/status/630359758273384448

Jim Rose's avatarUtopia, you are standing in it!

Those that argue that Japan surrendered for reasons other than the atomic bomb put forward contradictory arguments.

The first is the Japan was already seeking terms for surrender. That is true, but among those terms was avoiding occupation.

The Japanese leadership had already interpreted the terms of the Potsdam declaration was a sign of weakness. They hoped that by making the invasion of Japan as bloody as possible, they could extract even better terms in light of this sign of weakness at Potsdam. Kyushu, the  obvious initial invasion site in southern Japan, was  being heavily reinforced  by the middle of 1945.

Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war by the end of 1994 and they knew it.

Japan’s leaders believed they could make the cost of conquering Japan too high for the Allies to accept, leading to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat. The Japanese…

View original post 529 more words

Creative destruction in oldest businesses

How The Japan Times reported the atomic bombings

via How The Japan Times reported the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki | The Japan Times.

Unemployment rates across the OECD member countries

Hourly minimum wages before and after taxes, USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan

Figure 1: Hourly minimum wage before and after taxes, 2013, US dollars at purchasing power parities, single-person household

image

Source: OECD Focus on Minimum Wages after the crisis (2015).

A lot of countries borrowed a lot of money recently

Richer is greener: environmentalists are Environmental Kuznets Curve deniers

The Kuznets environmental curve describes an empirical regularity between environmental quality and economic growth. Outdoor water, air and other pollution first worse and then improves as a country first experiences economic growth and development.

While many pollutants exhibit this pattern in the Kuznets environmental curve, peak pollution levels occur at different income levels for different pollutants, countries and time periods. John Tierney explains:

In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems.

There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener.

As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulphur dioxide.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy.

When I was living in Japan in the mid 1990s, they just completed a period of rapid operation of the Kuznets environmental curve. I was told by my professors at Graduate School that in the 1960s, cities and prefectures welcomed polluting industries because of the better paid jobs they offered. At that time, shipping companies used like to go to Tokyo because the pollution in Tokyo Bay was so bad that it would clean all the barnacles off their ships. That made them sail faster.

image

Japanese incomes and wages doubled over the course of the 1960s. The Japanese voter was now prepared to support stricter pollution standards and environmental controls.

In the early 1970s, the ruling LDP stole the long-standing environmental policies of their opponents in a big crack down on pollution because the country could now afforded them.

Plenty of developing countries are democracies now. Their people could demand through the ballot box higher environmental standards and clean tap water but they don’t because of its cost to economic development.

The environmental movement lives in a state of denial regarding the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality.

The Empire of Japan in 1939

Top performers in science by gender, USA, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand

Why are Japanese 15-year-old girls as good at science as teenagers anywhere else in the world?

Figure 1: Percentage achieving the proficiency level 5 or higher in sciences by gender, USA, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, 2012

image

Source: OECD StatExtract.

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