tek: You are clearly very well undowed upstairs with buch of megs as well. I did not think you were in the "big labor union" camp either, that is why I was surprised and the "nostalgic" look at our former leadership in the big heavy industries. I think that different nations have different sectors in which they excel. The japaneses are excellent at managing complex multifaceted industries. They are much less innovative however. The germans are excellent in attention to details, but they operate in relatively strict frameworks. We are a fortunate nation in that we are merging different characteristics of various human strains and thus can excel in a very large number of endeavors.
I agree with you, however, that mythical thinking and ANY supremacy thinking is self defeating and brings with them catastrophes of major proportions. However, it may be worthwhile to go back to Marx' writings (the economic not the social part) on the role of capital per se. This is one area where we have some advantage (not for long), because our capital is so liquid, it can rapidly move to exploit new opportunities. No other country has such a well developed system for capital accumulation and its redeployment.
The intermingling of capital lending, equity and entreprise formation in Japan, is one of the reasons for their current predicament. Free market forces are not allowed to work for the optimization of capital utilization. We had a very similar problem when our tax system directed flow of capital to unproductive ends (and it gave us the big collapse of the savings and loans system and the closing of quite a large number of banks-all because of the preferentail tax treatment at the time for various real estate ventures), and we are running the danger of repeating our sins.
We are not the best in everything, and I do not think we should be either. I think, however, that we are managing the flow of change pretty well, and so far, better than most other developed countries.
Zeev |
