Years ago, more than a decade after "Japan As Number One" was published and just as the Japanese "miracle" was turning sour, I worked as a TF for Ezra Vogel's Industrial East Asia core course a couple of times. Ezra (a very nice guy, by the way) was still touting the lessons that the US could learn from Japan, even as the wheels were coming off in Tokyo.
Now there appear to be still more lessons, but of a negative sort: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_03/b4116000324539.htm?chan=magazine+channel_news It looks like this is going to be a long, hard slog for the US. One question (there are many, of course) that people will look back and wonder about in a few years is: How could US policymakers have repeated essentially the same catastrophic mistakes (albeit with some important differences, making the US situation far more serious in many ways) as Japan committed in the 1980s, and allowed not only one bubble (the NASDAQ bubble) but also a second and bigger bubble (the real estate bubble) to build up, with the Japanese example right in front of their noses? It is not that many people across the political spectrum did not warn about it, that is for sure. Maybe when Bob Woodward publishes the sequel to "Maestro", his brown-nosing book on Alan Greenspan, he can pretend to be a journalist for a change and put the question directly to AG. John Marchioro --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages prior to posting, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
