Japan faces a snap election on December 14th with Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe’s “Abenomics” on trial. From the conventional economics perspective of
GDP-measured growth, we are told that Japan is “stagnating” with excessive
debt.
Economists dispense their usual bromides:
“open up the economy”; “join the Transpacific Partnershp”; “cut government
spending”; “tax more”; “tax less”; “print money” – lurching between
austerity and stimulus.
As I wrote in August 2001 in Nikkei Ecology, from a futurist’s perspective
all this advice is nonsensical and today even more so. Japan is still
undergoing the now global transition of mature industrial economies from
short-term material economic growth at whatever social and environmental
costs – to a more mature, long-term, system-wide social development. As
other countries in Europe, North America and now China, India and Brazil
face the same breakdown of GDP-growth policies, new national scorecards and
metrics of company success are emerging.
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