😧 Learning the right lessons from the 1980s Japan panic

The American system of innovation has remarkable 'reserve strength'

A scene from Blade Runner, reimagined

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Back in July 1985, the journalist and historian Theodore H. White used the approaching 40th anniversary of America’s WWII victory to write an 8,000-word essay, “The Danger from Japan” in The New York Times Magazine. He argued the following: In defeating Japan militarily, America unintentionally empowered it economically. America kept the peace and secured a democratic ally, but Japan, operating with state discipline and commercial cunning, leveraged that peace to become the greater industrial power.

Victory, in other words, may not have been quite what it seemed on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. “Perhaps we did not win the war, perhaps the Japanese, unknown even to themselves, were the winners,” White concluded.