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Rick's avatar

I wonder: The whole article reads well-ish untill we reach the dogmatic part "Can Japan Reverse Course?" - why should they reverse course? Why is the demographic change such a apocalyptic scenario? They can - if they want to - go into more debt to fince this transition. The bank of japan and the yen has quite some autonomy here.

Second Point: I would even argue the housing in japan is so cheap because japan is losing roughly 800k citizens a year. Yes over-regulation seems to play a role, but for example the author completely misses the point that there is quite a high inheritance tax, making investments in housing way less profitable than in the western world. I had read somewhere that houses in Japan are considered an item similar to a car.

Third point: The author argues zombie firms are a bad thing per se. I think this can be argued with - they provide jobs, maybe bullshit jobs, but they keep people employed and these people do not have to rely on social welfare. Is that such a bad thing? One might even argue that such jobs are the future for the western world especially when we will lose jobs to AI, people will value e.g. an excellent customer service as provided in japan.

Finally the author does not really answer why fertility is in decline in japan, it might as well be due to bad conditions to raise a family, spoiling the utopian picture depicted here - i remember vaguely that for quite a while japan had the highest suicide rate in the world because of very demanding work-life culture and very rigid cultural norms.

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Quico Toro's avatar

Great piece Dr. Tabarrok.

One aspect to explore is that all that social order probably owes something to the employment stability you get from refusing to let zombie firms fail. Japanese policy makers think explicitly in these terms: the resistance to tightening lending standards is usually couched in terms of protecting employment. They may be right: the extra economic vitality may not be worth imperilling the secret sauce of an orderly society: predictable and stable career paths for the broad middle class.

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