The question is "what is the Japanese system"? It is a system of regulation (of which the state is only one actor). Regulation in the end is a social and political institutional process and product. Thus life time employment is a corporate form of regulation, of stabilizing the labor market, and ensuring internal labor markets through long on the job (OTJ) training, loyalty, and not-performance based tenure. The government has little to do with it. OTOH the reference to inept government is partly right (the Japanese government is known to muddle through) and hence Charles' closer reading is on the mark. But the problem is once you set the terms of the debate in binary terms such as market versus government then such a conclusion is inevitable at the cost of missing out on other institutional explanations.
cheers, a ^^^^ Yes, indeed. When we look at the Japanese system, and the U.S. "system" today , with its government Fed and Treasury so important, one thinks of ole Samuelson's textbook in 1969 declaring that both the U.S. and Soviet Union had "mixed systems". :>) And Samuelson is back in the news. Cheerio, CB [Samuelson's new position on free trade, etc] Guru of economics does an about-turn on free trade At 89, after decades of speaking in favour of it, Paul Samuelson says it's not such a good thing after all -clip- The thrust of Samuelson's analysis is that a country like China, basically a low-wage economy, will create a net negative impact on the American people, when it manages a substantial rise in productivity in an industry in which the United States was earlier a leader. Initially, American consumers may benefit from low-priced goods in their supermarket chains, but their gains may be more than neutralised by large losses sustained by American workers who lose their jobs....
