My brother is getting married on May 4 (which is my birthday, too!), so I'll be in Japan from April 29 to May 9 this year. Expect a high cultural level of reporting from yours truly. :-)
> > The past few years have seen a rash of scandals surrounding
>> bureaucrats who gave favours in return for trips to hostess bars,
>> surgeons who killed patients by leaving implements inside their
>> bodies, and police who continued with mah-jongg drinking parties
>> rather than respond to urgent calls for assistance.
>
>No, what's happening is that people are actually *reporting* these
>scandals, instead of hushing them up. The Nikkei Weekly ran a story on
>this, showing a steady rise in the index of consumer complaints over the
>course of the 1990s.
It would be good if an increasing number of consumer complaints were a sign of a legitimation crisis of which the Left could take advantage. More likely, though, consumer complaints will be used in a ruling-class attack on the bureaucracy & social programs, especially health care.
>The
>schools are better funded than their US counterparts and do a pretty good
>job, all things considered.
According to OECD's _Education at a Glance_ (1997), Table B4.1, on a per pupil basis the United States spends more than almost any other country on primary education: Switzerland, $5,860; USA, $5,300; Sweden, $5,030; Japan, $4,110; UK, $3,360; Germany, $3,350; France, $3,280; Netherlands, $3,010; Australia, $2,950; Spain, $2,580; and so on. The American problem originates in _insufficient centralization of funding & resulting vast inequality between rich & poor schools_:
***** THE NATIONAL DEBATE OVER SCHOOL FUNDING NEEDS A FEDERAL FOCUS First Appeared: Los Angeles Times - October 8, 2000 Byline: Ted Halstead & Michael Lind
...You would never know it from listening to the presidential candidates, but the federal role in funding education is minuscule. Until recently, the primary source of school funding has been local property taxes, supplemented by a small amount of aid from state governments and even less from the federal government. Other countries do not organize school financing the way that we do. Among countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1995, an average of 54% of funding for primary and secondary education came from central governments, 26% from regional and 22% from local. In the U.S., by contrast, the federal government supplied only 8% of funding, with the rest divided between state and local governments. The largest single federal program for schools, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, provides only about $ 8 billion, less than 3% of all local, state and federal education expenditures.
The U.S. does not suffer from a lack of overall school funding. On the contrary, it spends a greater share of national income on K-12 education than any other OECD country except Canada and Denmark. But the practice of funding schools by means of local and state property taxes has resulted in vast disparities in funding among states, cities and even neighborhoods.
The perversity of the system is easy to illustrate. Suppose you have an impoverished inner city whose per-pupil taxable property base is $ 50,000; the per-pupil property-tax base of an affluent suburb nearby is $ 250,000. The inner-city would have to levy a painfully high 10% property tax to raise the same amount of money--$ 5,000 a student--that the suburb could raise through a mere 2% rate....
<http://www.newamerica.net/articles/Halstead/TH-LAT-10.08.00.htm> *****
Yoshie