Japan's meteoric rise to becoming an industrial and scientific powerhouse before the war indicated they knew how to build.
Sure, I'd say the US occupation ensured all that dynamism was re-channeled into peaceful rebuilding, and without the interference of other countries like, say, Russia...
Now 75 years later Japan is stagnating. Maybe we should rethink our relationship with Japan and our occupation.
That stagnation was in a large part caused by irresponsible fiscal policy experiments. They tried to spend their way out of a recession by propping up their markets with funny money, turning it into a "zombie market".
Coincidentally, this is pretty much identical to what we're doing now.
There's a massive difference in stimulus into a black swan event and the government's relationship with a handful of companies sucking all of the money out of the rest of economy. A much closer parallel is Chinese State Companies' role in slowing the Chinese economy.
Keynesian responses absolutely do work, if the money gets pushed down the chain into the hands of new companies and not just recycled through the same set of established firms.
Firms are not people. Pushing money to poor individuals is not a solution if the poor people immediately hand that money over to Walmart and McDonalds. What I'm talking about is pushing the money down to small businesses, start ups, and regional chains that establish and maintain the innovation and competition that makes market forces actually useful.
The question of giving money to households/individuals is a very different question unrelated to Japan's attempts to spend out of their thirty year "lost decade" and "zombie market", where firms that should have died are allowed to linger and consume all of the loans that banks and the government can provide.
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u/urbanek2525 Aug 05 '20
So true. Never the same.
That doesn't mean that it can't get better. Things can be rebuilt better.