Seiko, Swatch, and the Swiss Watch Industry (with Aled Maclean-Jones)

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🗓️ 16 February 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

How did an industry survive a technology that should have made it obsolete? Aled Maclean-Jones explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how Japanese quartz watches nearly wiped out Swiss watchmaking with cheaper, more accurate alternatives--and how the Swiss redefined the value of a watch to recover market dominance. Maclean-Jones discusses the Japanese innovations that led to the Swiss industry's collapse; the brilliant decision by a pair of Swiss mavericks to change the narrative around mechanical watches; and the consolidation and standardization of Swiss watchmaking undertaken by Swatch founder Nicolas Hayek.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.5	Today is December 29th, 2025, and my guest is the writer Allid McLean Jones.
0:43.9	His substack is Rakes Digress, which is a play on Rakes Progress, I hope.
0:50.5	Our topic today is a wonderful essay of his on how japanese innovation disrupted this the watch
0:57.9	industry particularly the swiss watch industry and yet somehow swiss entrepreneurs found a way to stay
1:04.7	alive allad welcome to econ talk um thanks very much uh russ i've been a listener for a long time, so it's a real pleasure to be here.
1:12.6	Great to have you.
1:13.6	Your essay appeared in the publication Works in Progress, which listeners can also explore.
1:19.6	We'll link to it.
1:20.6	The title of your essay is The Survival of Swiss Watches.
1:23.6	And the essay and the story you tell begins in 1984 with two men sleeping in their car.
1:31.8	Who are they and why do they matter?
1:34.8	Yeah, so I chose that year, I suppose, that period, the early 1980s was the kind of seen
1:41.5	certainly within the Swiss watch industry is the kind of pivotal moment.
1:45.0	So it's also probably the moment of the Swiss watch industry's lowest ebb.
1:51.0	So certainly for the last 30 years prior, they essentially had a dominance over the global watch market.
1:59.0	You know, watches meant Swiss.
	...

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