__Lessons_from_Winter_Olympics_in_Vancouver

Division of Int’l Studies 2008230003 Young Sung Kim Essay 1 Topic: Lessons from Winter Olympics in Vancouver, 2010 Few months ago, Winter Olympics took place in Vancouver, Canada. People around the world were so excited and they shared the same values such as love, peace, and cooperation. It is good to have Olympics as an annual global festival because it gathers people around the world all together and bring stability to the global society. As long as people share some values together, they are less likely to fight against each other and evoke a war. There are several positive aspects of Olympics and therefore we should encourage it to take place annually. As a Korean citizen, it was so proud that Republic of Korea took 5th place in Vancouver Winter Olympics. Korea won 6 gold medals, 6 silver, and 2 bronze medals. Particularly Yu-Na Kim, a well-known figure skating queen, broke the world record and ranked the top. Her record not only brought her gold medal, but also huge amount of economic incentives from large conglomerates that used her as a model. She made huge profits for the company, and they were compensating for that profits made by Yu-Na Kim. Korea has now become one of the wealthiest countries among the countries all around the world, yet still has a lot of things to work through. Then here comes a question, do every wealthy nations show exceptional performances in Olympics' It seems likely when we see the results; Canada was ranking the top in Vancouver Olympics, followed by Germany and the United States. However, I was wondering how come Japan did not gain any gold medals from Vancouver Olympics. Japan is one of the wealthiest countries around the globe and hypothetically Japan should get gold medal as many as they can. But somehow, Japan got no gold medal from this Olympics. I want to analyze the reason why Japan showed so poor performances in Olympics in an economic aspect. First of all, Japan might be satisfied with their status quo. They are already wealthy and they might think that they need no more economic incentives to achieve economic development. If people feel wealthy, they might think that they are having an easy life style and they tend to be lazy. Their laziness will lead them to poor performances in every aspect in their society. Poor performance in Winter Olympics is an example of Japan’s status quo. Athletes in Japan were quite satisfied with their lives, and thus they felt less need to train themselves harder and harder to achieve medals from Olympics. Plus, as long as they sustain and desire high quality of life style, people tend to live long and fertility rate will likely to decrease. People get older and older as time goes by, and Japan will gradually become the aged society which means more than 20% of the population will be older than 65. As we all know, if there are so many old people in the society, productivity of that nation will likely to plummet in a short period of time. Less fertility rate is even worse because there will be less working population as time goes by. Less working population means less human capital, and this will lead a nation to experience regression. Finally, nation with low fertility rates will end up in economic regression because their domestic market will likely to shrink. Consumption will decrease probably because there are less people to purchase products from the market. In contrast, transfer payments from the government will likely to increase because older population will continue to grow faster. As older population increase, government needs to spend money for welfare, unemployment, and etc. These circumstances brought Japan a economic recession, and probably no gold medal from the Winter Olympics. Then we need to ask another question. Is there a proper remedy for Japan, a country now experiencing social depression' Clearly it is a complicated issue to handle, but fortunately there are remedies for Japan to recover from current depression. First of all, Japanese government should encourage people to give birth to babies in a short-run. There should be enough working population in order to make their economy revive. With more young population, Japanese society will become much more vital than nowadays and this will definitely encourage people to become less lazy. Plus, Japanese government should now recognize that international arena is not stable as they think. There are lots of potential to change and it is possible that Japan will no longer be one of the wealthiest nations in the near future.