Japan's Two Economic Miracles and two Economic Disasters
The Answer Has Always Been There: How to Choose Prosperity Over Decline and War Japan has produced two economic miracles and two economic catastrophes, and the mechanism behind each is the same. The West is quietly replicating the disasters while ignoring the cures. It is not too late to learn the lesson, but the window, as Japan's own history suggests, does not stay open indefinitely. A Country That Keeps Getting Explained Japan is the economic mystery that keeps getting explained and never quite solved. A country that industrialised from a standing start in the late nineteenth century, rebuilt itself from actual rubble after 1945, and then spent the better part of three decades shuffling around in a recessionary daze after 1990, it is the kind of story that should make economic theorists deeply uncomfortable, because the standard toolkit of explanations fits only so far before it starts to creak. Ageing demographics, zombie banks, monetary policy missteps, the particular rigiditi...