Re: Re: Changing Japanese Employment Practices

[Dennis Robert Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Jim Devine wrote:

> The Japanese government seems to like to have stimulus packages that are
> too small and too short-lived. They are very weak-willed Keynesians.

It's also where the money is being spent, i.e. the fact that Japan is
still a production-oriented economy. The money went into infrastructure
and bailouts instead of new forms of consumer demand. You'd think the
Japanese Left could make considerable hay out of calling for some sort of
East Asian Keynesianism -- debt write-offs for Indonesia, Thailand,
Malaysia etc., and ecological/informatic investment in the East Asian core
economies, plus drastically lower working hours for long-suffering
Japanese workers. Weirdly, the JCP seems to be fixated on the evils of
deficit financing (see <http://www.jcp.or.jp/english/> for the details),
rather than obvious remedies, such as taxing the hell out of the keiretsu.

-- Dennis