Real interest rates in Japan were on par with in the US in the mid-2000s [0], and only entered the negative range when the US began dropping interest rates to near 0 during the GFC [0].
The bigger issue in was the hangover of the 1990s Japanese bust which lead to larger players tightening their belts at the expense of smaller players [1]
The big players in Japan are also similarly old (usually 300-500 year old guilds converted into corporations/zaibatsus in the 19th century)
There is also a succession crisis brewing in plenty of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese businesses. One person in my network is leaving American Tech PE/VC to concentrate on buying out Korean and a Japanese companies facing issues around succession now - just like American SMEs businesses faced in the 1970s-2000s.
Ik people like to shoehorn the Japanese experience to extrapolate American and Western policy, but the Japanese economy is structured very differently from Western economies with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to opposed), welfare (highly supportive), inflation (keep it as low as possible), and state intervention (highly supportive).
The only developed countries that can safely be compared to the Japanese economy are South Korea and Taiwan (maybe Dirigisme-era France and Italy pre-1990s, but they had the benefits of the EC/EU which made stuff significantly different).
I recommend reading "The Japanese Economy" by Takatoshi Ito and Takeo Hoshi [2] and "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap [3]
[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?end=2013&lo...
[1] - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/01/03/national/execs-...
[2] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538244/the-japanese-economy/
[3] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
Survived nearly 1500 -> Nearly survived 1500
Kongo gumi still continued operating even though it went through a restructuring, so it's fair to say it's still the oldest company in the world.
Just it's no longer the oldest family business in the world - that ended when direct Kongo control of it ended, although I hear they still have a ceremonial involvement with the company.
I feel like the core of the company – led as a family business, earning real money – would be lost if it was suddenly state-supported, with the inevitable meddling to go with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamura_Shaji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
(Of course, since wiki page hasn’t been updated for the first, it might also have quietly passed into the ether)
Indeed, by the time Europe had f*ed up all of Asia in the mid-1800s and reached Japan again, Japan had very high levels of literacy which was perfect for selectively taking of high-culture/industrial-technology of Europe.
Article doesn’t seem to mention that Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.
Most construction businesses don’t have this recurring revenue model, tied to religious rebuilding.
The reason there are few really old buildings in Japan is that earthquakes and WW2 destroyed almost all of them. That said, Kyoto and Nara do have numerous 300+ year old buildings like Todaiji, which also remains the world's largest wooden structure.
The world's oldest extant wooden structure is the Kondō (main hall) of the temple Hōryū-ji 法隆寺 in Ikaruga, in the Nara Prefecture of Japan. It was initially built in 607 but completely burned down due to lightning. It was rebuilt in 670, but again nearly burned down by accident in 1949 [1].
It's interesting to contemplate how across these timescales war, disasters, and accidents make it so difficult for structures to survive.
What is old? These companies have differing memberships, different corporate structures, and make different things. Yet we call them the same company.
Constancy need not be only of form. It can also be of concept.
I think this is more the exception than the rule, isn't it?
These companies have survived because any time the family had only girls, one of the women would marry and their husband would be adopted. Thus making the husband the eldest man, and keeping the business in the family.
Japan having family businesses is not the factor, all businesses were good family businesses before the invention of the stock company. Instead what doomed most family businesses in the west was the eventual chance of getting unlucky with inheritance.
The general acceptance of adult adoption to continue a family line, kept those businesses in a single family and justified passing the business whole to the "eldest son".
> In some odd ways, you can view many of Japan's famous and historical companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui as having assumed the role of the lords from feudal Japan, and the employees working for these companies can be seen as the modern day warriors. They devote absolute loyalty to their companies/modern day lords, who in turn vow to take care of these warriors by providing life-time employment, etc.
> However, if these warriors tarnished the image of their companies somehow, e.g., involving in a scandal whereby their companies get blamed, or the reputation is severely damaged, then these corporate warriors would assume responsibility by kneeling down to apologize in public, and/or in some cases, jump off a building in an extreme expression of their deep regrets for failing to defend the honor of the company.
Historically, warriors who protected the feudal lords would also commit suicide when they failed their master. See the Bushido book for more information about Japanese culture in English terms. It's really hard to express the culture in English, I think, because some is lost in translation and some is just hard to put in words.
Japan is one such country and also happens to have been around a long time too.
Also, for a group to be resilent, there actually needs to be a lot of creativity at in its members as otherwise it will collapse when it meets challenges.
And keep in mind that China had the Cultural Revolution which reset the counter to zero.
Looks like hospitality and foodservice make up the majority of the list, while very old construction companies are actually relatively rare.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheDrawing...
Most entertainment business are also not solving problems, and yet manage to be extremely successful businesses. See: Disney, Pokémon, video game companies, etc.
Their structure seems to have been like a private corporation, with special rules and efforts to maintain their ideology and culture. They had the ability to expand outside the current leading families when necessary, though.
When they hit the recent hard patch, they pivoted, but didn’t scale back enough to survive until the next great leader showed up. They fell into the hands of modern corporations, and we all know how that turns out.
I seize the opportunity to wish you a great satisfying and fulfilling life in harmony with the rest of your relatives, whoever you are.
1. Datacenters or datacenter construction may be the most high-tech ones I would try. Not cloud services, but the literal physical buildings.
2. Musical instruments, art supplies, or other cultural/religious goods of some kind, possibly as high-tech as electric guitars or synthesizers (although those have not historically gone well).
3. Financialization businesses like insurance or securities packaging of some kind could work (if you don't get high on your own supply).
4. Food and hospitality never go out of style.
I assume that the way this sort of business would work is a 3-step process:
1. Start by becoming the best in the world at something very weird and specific.
2. Bootstrap your business with enough connections to start making sales without needing significant financing. Run as a completely bootstrapped business.
3. Convince your children to continue being the best in the world at that thing and maintain your values. If you don't have any suitable children, adopt one. Also, make sure to disinherit any children who are not both very competent and fully onboard with the plan - you need to keep the power concentrated in the one or two best successors.
It's no accident that a lot of these long-lived businesses in Japan, where all three of these are part of the culture.
One answer would be focusing on basic human activities. People will still probably be eating and traveling in 500 years.
Another would be to figure out and/or develop the “temple” of whatever future belief system or religion one thinks will be necessary and popular in the future. And this could be a currently existing religion; Islam and Christianity will probably be around in some form or another for a long long time.
With wooden furniture you are (at least for some time) also blocking release of stored CO2 back into atmosphere, a fate all other wood faces.
I’m sure there are modern day rich people who can trace their way back to the Greek rulers of Egypt who intermarried with the Egyptians of antiquity.
You can trace power. Aristocracy used marriage as a political tool, but I doubt there are commercial entities that persisted - business was seen as dirty in those days in Western culture. Anywhere the Catholic Church was, lots of enterprises were laundered through them.
"The oldest preserved share in the Swedish copper mining company Stora Kopparberg (Falun Mine) in Falun was issued in 1288. It granted the Bishop of Västerås 1/8th (12.5%) ownership, and it is also the oldest known preserved share in any company in the world."
Interesting, especially considering that Sweden didn’t have limited liability companies until 1st of January 1849 [1]. Any ideas how this worked?
1. https://www.foretagskallan.se/foretagskallan-nyheter/lektion...
Some stores will have people willing to stick their neck out to defend them during riots. Some have good insurance and don’t care. Which ones get obliterated when the pitchforks and torches come out?
Are there any that have existed as long as this company? Some sort of have if you are a bit vague and wave your hands a bit.
I think there’s many restaurants that last a long time, but they aren’t what I’d consider a “large” company.
However, the earliest written references to falafel from Egyptian sources date to the 19th century
-Wikipedia
I doubt there's a 1000 yr old falafel shop in Jerusalem, if you remember the name, pray tell
I had to go check whether they'd survived the 2008 financial crisis without being absorbed, and I think they did. A lot of the UK's oldest banks and building societies got absorbed in a consolidation wave immediately before (and partly causative of) the financial crisis.
It's like the Hudson's Bay Company, which claims continuous existence since 1670. That's really a unit of US mall operator NRDC Equity Partners, which acquired Hudson's Bay and switched to using that name. They also own Saks Fifth Avenue and various other department store chains.[1]
Wineries, hotels, and makers of ceremonial goods are indeed common among older companies listed on Wikipedia.
However, I was watching the second video linked in the article made by Endevr and it just sounds like it was made by and read by ChatGPT. The pauses are off and inflections are exactly the same on some words sounding unnatural. Is it me, or does anyone else feel that way about it? This isn't a new trend, is it?
When you buy an AI voice, there isn't (yet) much you can do to get it vary its read, and many of the least-expensive voices you can buy are from these early mostly self-taught voice talent. When I used to hire agents to train for one of the 78 Voice Acting Expo events we put on, they would tell me that most voice actors "lose their talent when they get an agent". Too many trainees feel that acting is not something you do, it something used to train them, and that once they are trained and graduate by getting an agent, they simply need to "open their mouth and gold will fall out". A similar reversion to the mean happens in other areas of training. People return to just "making an effort" after training. I remember my parents (father was an Army doctor) going to tennis camps, and being good for a few weeks afterwards, but not having much of what they learned "stick".
It's interesting to see AI immortalize this odd self-taught speech.
I guess it's good business from the ad income sharing, and at the very least it's slightly more interesting than people posting reactions to reaction videos.
The institutions that endure seem to be religious, or family run institutions. One change in outlook is towards values/principles(/blind-faith?), as opposed to scaling/commercial aspects. Nation states and companies are broadly about a century old, and philosophers need to think and call out paths for current institutions and people for endurance.
2) Evolution is possible with endurance. Religions and these family business have adapted to changing requirements of the world (mostly). It's core principles that have perhaps stayed the same. There's also confirmation bias at play - theres plenty institutions that were at odds with evolution did die out for sure.
You raise a good point, but IMO we're giving close to zero thought on how our current institutions will endure. Perhaps one answer is don't do anything and some will anyway.. (I don't like that answer, personally)
Some small percentage of those photons are going to approach the black hole at the perfect distance such that they will be slung back on a trajectory where our solar system will be 1500 years from now.
Suppose in a thousand years we decide to build a space telescope of tremendous proportion sufficient to peer into that tiny little window and it takes us 500 years to build it. We could watch opening day!
Have you calculated this or are you just speculating?
The quantization of light is a real physical limit that may make this impossible. The rest sounds more like engineering problems.
Under direct sunlight typical illumination at noon is on the order of 1 kW/m^2 (this is a slight overestimate, since Japan is in the mid-latitudes and not the tropics). Typical surfaces reflect roughly 10-20% of the light that strikes them; let's say 10% to make the math easy and to compensate for the previous overestimate. So 100 W of mostly visible light is reflected, i.e., 100 joules of energy per second.
A single photon of visible light has an energy of about 4 x 10^-19 J, so that's 2.5 x 10^20 photons reflected from our hypothetical square meter per second.
The black hole has a radius of around 30 km, or an apparent area in the sky equivalent to a plane of size pi * (30 km)^2 = 2800 km^2. It's actually a bit bigger than that because the "shadow" of a black hole is larger than the event horizon, and that's what we need to hit, not the horizon itself. So let's say 10,000 km^2 to make it nice and round. That's 10,000 km^2 of coverage on a "sphere" of radius 1500 ly and hence of area 4 * pi * (1500 ly)^2 = 2.5 x 10^33 km^2. So the shadow of the black hole occupies about 4 x 10^-30 of the sky.
If we spread out 2.5 x 10^20 photons across the sky evenly, we hit the black hole's shadow with about one-billionth of a photon from our square meter of Earth per second, or about one photon every 30 years. You hit it with a photon from somewhere on Earth at most roughly every ten seconds or so (when the geometry is such that Earth is close to "full" from the black hole's perspective).
The situation for actually lensing it properly to get it back to Earth is far worse, since not only do you have to hit the "shadow", you have to hit a particular point in the distorted image of the sky that corresponds to Earth, meaning you effectively have to thread this needle twice. Assuming you just want to hit Earth, which is bigger than the black hole's shadow, you're still trying to hit another 10^-26 or so shot. A single photon from Earth should make that shot roughly every 10^19 years, or about a billion times the current age of the Universe.
TLDR: ain't gonna work.
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In reality, none of this matters for a more fundamental reason: diffraction. The fact that light "smears out" as it travels poses a fundamental limit to resolution based on the size of your telescope, and the resolution we're trying to achieve here is orders of magnitude beyond it. For scale, Hubble is pretty close to the diffraction limit for visible light and a telescope of its size, and it already can't image planets within our own solar system at the resolution we're talking about here. So no reasonable telescope could even image Earth from the black hole, much less image a tiny portion of Earth.
...or that would be true, if you limited yourself to physical telescopes.
See, the diffraction limit depends on the size of your telescope, or more properly, on the size of its lens. And the effective size of a gravitational lens can be very, very large indeed. It turns out that current technology is sufficient to reach a distance where the distortion of the Sun's own gravity focuses light - the required distance is a few times the distance to the Voyager probes. From that vantage point, you could theoretically use the Sun itself as a giant telescope. And the resolutions achievable are tight enough that, while you wouldn't be able to image individual square meters, you actually could image details of planets with a resolution of tens of km (the rough equivalent of looking at a globe from a distance of a couple of feet away) across galactic distances. [1]
The reason this works is that it's not hitting the gravitational shadow of the gravitationally-lensing object itself - it's hitting a focal "ring" with a very large radius around the object, effectively magnifying the imaged object by ~eleven orders of magnitude. At such magnification even a handful of square meters start hitting with meaningful numbers of photons, though diffraction is still (I think) the limiting factor on actually resolving anything.
The black hole here is not much more massive than the Sun, so it wouldn't achieve too much more power. But with careful observation, you could use the hole to image Earth to a scale that would let you map out our world and our civilization to reasonable accuracy - if not the details of our corporate endeavors.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS for an example of this kind of lensing on the scale of galaxies, which allows us to see a single star (or possibly a binary) from literally halfway across the Universe.
That, and the fact that it's much nicer to poke fun at "higher ups" than at peers. So if you make your whole organization about "higher ups" there's a lot of fun to be poked, I guess.
It would be impossible to make this joke about Judaism or Islam, or at least, if you did, it wouldn’t make any sense.
The Knights of Malta is a similar case, though newer; used to be a state, and kind of still pretends to be a state, but really a non-profit corporation of sorts.
(Of course, if you want to get super-vague, one could semi-reasonably argue that the Catholic Church is just a successor state to the Roman Republic via the Empire anyway, which pushes it back to about 500BCE.)
