[PEN-L:32799] Re: Damn Marxist Economists Again

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

At the same time it seems to perpetuate the myth of the median voter. Who
were the Japanese capitalists financing for runs for elective office?

Ian





----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Perelman" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 10:52 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:32794] Damn Marxist Economists Again


> The punch line comes at the end.
>
> "Capitalist Politicians, Socialist Bureaucrats? Legends of
>  Government Planning from Japan"
>       Antitrust Bulletin, Forthcoming
>
>       BY:  YOSHIRO MIWA
>               University of Tokyo
>            J. MARK RAMSEYER
>               Harvard Law School
>
> Document:  Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
>            http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=349341
>
>            Other Electronic Document Delivery:
>            http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/
>            SSRN only offers technical support for papers
>            downloaded from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection
>            location. When URLs wrap, you must copy and paste
>            them into your browser eliminating all spaces.
>
> Paper ID:  Harvard Law and Economics Discussion Paper No. 385
>
>  Contact:  J. MARK RAMSEYER
>    Email:  Mailto:RAMSEYER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>   Postal:  Harvard Law School
>            1575 Massachusetts Avenue
>            Cambridge, MA 02138  UNITED STATES
>    Phone:  617-496-4878
>      Fax:  617-496-6118
>  Co-Auth:  YOSHIRO MIWA
>    Email:  Mailto:miwa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>   Postal:  University of Tokyo
>            7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku
>            Tokyo 113-0033,    JAPAN
>
> ABSTRACT:
>  The debate over the role bureaucrats played in the postwar
>  Japanese economy has been the wrong debate. To date, it has been
>  a debate about effectiveness: the government tried to promote
>  growth through interventionist policies, but did it succeed? In
>  fact, the government never tried. Majority voters did not want
>  interventionist bureaucrats, and consistently rejected communist
>  and socialist candidates offering interventionist approaches.
>  Instead, they chose candidates from the centrist, decidedly
>  non-interventionist party. Reflecting those electoral market
>  exigencies, politicians in power seldom gave their bureaucrats
>  the authority to alter market investment and production
>  decisions.
>
>  To explore these issues, we first investigate the tools
>  Japanese politicians gave their bureaucrats. We find that
>  bureaucrats lacked the mechanisms they would have needed to
>  shape significantly production or investment. Second, we
>  reexamine the central anecdote behind the legend of Japanese
>  bureaucratic power: the 1965 showdown between Sumitomo Metals
>  and MITI. We find that Sumitomo rather than MITI won the battle.
>  Last, we survey the case law on bureaucratic power, and find
>  that Japanese courts strictly restricted bureaucratic
>  discretion.
>
>  There is a broader moral here, and it goes to the perils of
>  relying on secondary research. For obvious reasons, Japanese
>  politicians and bureaucrats encouraged stories that disguised
>  ordinary pork-barrel policies as growth-enhancing intervention.
>  Although the tales they told differed little from the
>  self-serving accounts politicians tell everywhere, in the 1960s
>  most Japanese social scientists were Marxists. Understandably,
>  they had little sense of how markets worked, and no skepticism
>  at all about the powers of governments to plan. Yet it is their
>  accounts on which modern observers rely for their picture of the
>  postwar Japanese political economy. Had modern scholars done
>  more than recount the conclusions in the secondary literature,
>  they would have noticed that they were merely adding academic
>  gloss to political sloganeering. Unfortunately, they never
>  tried.
>
>
> --
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Chico, CA 95929
> 530-898-5321
> fax 530-898-5901
>