Somebody please critique/digest this article about Japanese economics to me.

Two new answers by next week...

Enrique is au fait with Japanese Economics? i am not sure why this surprises me.

Well, he seems to know a bit about politics and economics, so he would be better able to make comment than someone who just wanted to make fart jokes... the floor is not just open to those named in the question!

might have a look over week-end, but a lot of good stuff on the overall website.

Japan is often pointed to as an example of an economy that played by its own rules for a long time (especially re: protectionism and guarding their own key industries from imports/takeovers/etc) and had its moment in the sun but is now fucked 'cause they can't deal with the super disco moves of a globalized economy. Your boy says this is wrong and here's why--putting him in the Keynesian a-regulated-economy-is-a-healthy-one camp which is these days a pretty leftist one. I am leery of the lack of hard documentation but it was still an interesting read.

Did that help?

Your friend has some pretty shoddy work here. Just take the very first paragraph, where he baldly asserts (without providing his sources) that China's economy is 1/8th the size of Japan's. Now, granted, estimates for the size of China's economy are all over the map (first, no one agrees on how to tally up the off-the-books economic activity of a billion or so peasants, and secondly, the ChiComs keep up Communism's unbroken century-long streak of just making up their numbers).

But no one - no one - estimates China's current GDP as 1/8th Japan's. Unless your friend is using 25-year-old books as reference, that’s absurdly low. Maybe the writer of this article is talking per-capita GDP, or not talking GDP at all, but he should have specified. He just used the word "economy," which isn't a measurable number, anyway. It's like saying "Radiohead's music is 1/8th Pavement's." 1/8th what, dick? Album sales? Quality? Jacob Javitz references? Specify!

Basically, the whole article is "conspiracy theory economics." Your friend just asserts, again with scant-to-no evidence, that although everyone thinks Japan is in a slump, they're actually swimming around in Uncle-Scrooge style money bins and enjoying the boom years. His serious, I'm-not-making-this-up theory on why this is has two parts:
1) A conspiracy of neoliberal economists falsely portray their ultrasmokin' economy as miserable
2) Because Japanese culture puts a premium on politeness, they are just too damned polite to correct us.

Again, ridiculous.

Here's some real-life numbers: the OECD pegs the Japanese economy as growing at a paltry 0.2% rate from 1998-2002 (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_gro_199&int=10&id=ja)
We don't dispute this. The Japanese don't dispute this. The current Prime Minister of Japan ran his campaign as a "reformer," promising to make big changes and shake up the broken economic system. So basically your friend believes things about the Japanese economy that even the Japanese don't believe.

Anyway, the rest of the piece proceeds from that premise; "since the Japanese economy is obviously perfect, and since it differs in some ways from classic neoliberal economic theory, therefore neolib econ is completely wrong." Incidentally, he either overstates of misstates almost all his examples of the ways the Japanese economy differs from neolib theory.

As for your friend's political beliefs, he's obviously a man on the left. He's what's called a Third Way Socialist.

Took me a while to find this thread again...

Basically, the whole article is "conspiracy theory economics."

That's what I suspected, knowing him.

Political beliefs on the left? That's very odd, because as someone who identifies as very right-wing, he's someone whose beliefs appear to have swung so far to the right that he's back at the left.

I suspect that he's a right-winger who supported Globalisation until it was *his* job that was shipped overseas, but I wanted someone else's opinion on this.