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]<p>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].<p>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.<p>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.<p>Unsurprisingly, this trend can be seen to this day in any industry - be it chip design, VFX, battery manufacturing, etc.<p>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.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602" rel="nofollow">https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statcan/42-206/CS42-206-1965-eng.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statc...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japans-phenomenal-shipbuilders" rel="nofollow">https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japan...</a>
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.