It's insane how successful Japan is in spite of their corporate inefficiencies.
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To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.
China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).
Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.
Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.
Societies need to come up with a new model.
As is, women regularly delayed having children until they're near or past their fertility window, if they want children at all. In our current society, it's difficult to both have a career and be a mother.
If scientists could come up with a way of making women much more fertile up to, say, age 60 (in an affordable and reliable way I mean, current treatments are unreliable and horrifically expensive), I wonder what effect this would have on the birth rate.
Better would be to just make things easier for parents. Cheap or free childcare, for one thing.