DeLong's Japanese 'Utopia'

[Brad De Long]

>On Mon, 3 Jul 2000 TRox51 at aol.com wrote:
>
>>  But apparently one Berkeley professor can't understand, no
>>  matter how much he reads, that there was a terrible cost to the
>>  so-called Japanese miracle, not only to the Japanese environment and
>>  political culture, but to Korea's, Vietnam's and other
>>  countries as well.
>
>But Japan also has some of the toughest laws against pollution around

Yeah, but an "administrative process" that seem sometimes to neglect 
to enforce them effectively...


>, one
>of the most egalitarian distributions of wealth

I remember back when whichever-it-was bought Van Gogh's "Sunflowers". 
I thought: "This thing is going to be hanging on the wall of 
somebody's office. Whose office? And should it enter into the 
official distribution-of-wealth statistics as the wealth of the guy 
whose office it's in?"

We're interested in wealth distributions because they tell us both 
about the distribution of consumption goods and they tell us 
something about power over people. I'm not sure the mapping between 
material wealth and power over people is the same in Japan as it is 
in the U.S. or in Europe...

Brad DeLong, who has no *reason* to think that the wealth 
distribution figures are giving us a false picture, but who is 
suspicious...