His position, which I agree with, is that Japan’s gigantic, very-low-interest-debt-financed infrastructure building spree starting around 1990 was the best option available after the 80′s bubble burst and threatened to drag it into a depression.
Nearly lost among Unz’s stable of, to put it politely, “tireless critics of Zionism,” is Eamonn Fingleton’s recent columnsextolling the success of Japan’s no-migration Keynesianism.
“For a start Japanese airports are state-of-the-art and invariably these days enjoy fast public transport links to downtown areas. Meanwhile the Japanese people are among the world’s best dressed and they drive some of the world’s best cars – in particular Lexuses and Infinitis that are a world away from the tinny little three-wheelers of the 1980s.
Then there are Japan’s urban skylines. These have been transformed by a huge building boom during the “lost decades” that has greatly alleviated Japan’s previous shortage of housing space. According to figures compiled by skyscraperpage.com, already as of 2012, 81 high-rise buildings taller than 152 meters (500 feet) had been constructed in Tokyo since 1989. That compares with 64 in New York, 48 in Chicago and seven in Los Angeles.
The construction boom has produced many superlatives. The AkashiKaikyoBridge, linking two of Japan’s main islands, boasts the longest main span of any bridge in the world – no mean feat given that the engineering challenge in bridge-building increases with the cube of the span. Then there is the world’s first long-distance maglev line. Construction is well advanced, and trains will eventually run at world-record speeds of up to 350 miles an hour. Meanwhile the Tokyo Skytree skyscraper-cum-communications-tower, which was completed in 2012, boasts a height of 634 meters. This makes it the second tallest free-standing structure in the world after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
Perhaps the most compelling single statistic is that just since 1989 alone, average life expectancy at birth has increased by 5.9 years – to 84.7 years from 78.8 years. This means the Japanese now typically live 4.3 years longer than Britons and 5.0 years longer than Americans.”
I’d add to Krugman’s point further that Japan’s average performance on a per capita basis is even more impressive considering that (1) it has nearly the lowest per-capita natural resources in the developed world, and this has become an increasing handicap since the long bull market in natural resources began around 1998 (2) Japan is right next to more than a billion high-IQ, low-wage, genetically similar Chinese who are intent on beating them in every market.
