Recent comments by Yoshimichi Moriyama

• The Sino-American Test in North Korea

  Mr. Solana seems to have drawn a conclusion, perhaps quite correctly, that "the two countries' markedly diffrent poliicy-approaches will not facilitate matters."
  
  Reading of Chinese history and its modern diplomatic history of how China has responded to the outside world will show that it is unusually egocentric. It has repeatedly failed, due to this egocentrism, to appreciate its real position in the world; it has always inflated it; it has inflated itself and deflated the world.
  
  To China, possibly, a nuclear North Korea can be an asset, not a liability. The United States, Russia and Japan would have to prepare themselves together for a radically altered nuclear situation though I would not like to imagine and say it.

• The Promise of Abenomics

  Abe has started from a very good place to start. It was the only place to start; no one could have started from anywhere else.
  
  I am amazed so many people of foreign countries know so well about Japanese economy. All is well that ends well, but the sad fact is that all is not well that begins well. As Prof. Stiglitz has said. there are hurdles to jump over.
  
  Joseph Grew was US ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942. He watched the turbulent years of the1930's Japan. One comment of his was that the Japanese shy away from difficult problems instead of facing up. What I have in mind is the Japanese inefficient use of national land. I understand European countries have stricter reglulations concerning the use of land.
  
  The Japanese Liberal Democratic Party has been in power almost without a break for the past sixty years and it has consistently avoided this land problem. This misguided land policy has been the cause for the generally lower, otherwise bigger, level of disposable incomes of the people in general. It has also made production costs unavoidably and unnecessarily higher, shrinking domestic demand.
  
  Another hurdle, usually unobserved, is that leaders of the economic circles are naively credulous. They read and belived Prof. Ezra Vogel's Japan As The Number One. They thought amidst the bubbles of economy that Japan was overtaking the United States. They believed that the huge deficits of the US was because the Japanese market was closed. They believed like economists what rational expectations hypothesis and supply-side economics said. They believed, after the bubbles burst, everything of Japanese economic and corporate management was wrong.
  
  The best I can say for now is that we must keep to the started course and bon voyage.
  
  

• BRICS Without Mortar

  Prof. Nye,
  I am afraid the BRICS would not agree to your opinion, but I am sure the BRIS would do.
  
  You quoted from a Korean-Canadian citizen, Mr. Norimitsu Onishi, a perfect Japanese name, in your The Future of Power. The quoted part reminded me, for instance, of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Professor Steve Tsang of Nottingham University.
  
  President Roh said South Korea should play the role of a balancer between the US and China, such as the one once played by Great Britain in European politics.
  
  Prof. Tsang said in "China without North Korea", Project-Syndicate, Feb. 14, 2013 that "China need not fear a South Korean-led unification of the peninsula. China already enjoys a smoother relationship with the South..." and "Japan and the US [would be] compelled to inject a huge amount of aid...This hardly runs counter to China's interests..."
  
  He went on to say, "Moreover, a united Korea will have inherited the North Korea's nucleas weapons. This will pose challenges to US-Korea relations, which should work to China's advantage. The US will remain committed to de-nuclearizing the peninsula, while the Korean government will be tempted to retain the North's nuclear capabilities. This strain further reduces the risk of having US troops stationed on the Korean side of China's border."

• Revanchist China

  The Chinese are "a people imbued with a deep sense of superior moral worth." Prof. Edwin O. Reischauer said, "The ethnic pride of the Chinese is monumental."
  
  I think Dr. Lee is one of the best China watchers. He reads the inside and outside of China like the palm of his hand. His essays are available at the Centre for Independent Studies (http://www.cis.org.au/) and the Hudson Institute (http://www.hudson.org/). His book "Will China Fall?" is now available online at the former organization.

• Our Children’s Economics

  Queen Elizaabeth Ⅱexpectied too much but she was not alone in this. All of us expect what it cannot answer or offer.
  
  The revolution initiated by Keynes? No, he did not do any such revolutionary thing. A revolutionary event had taken place in the real world. No economist saw it. No one knew it. No one was abel to see it because we see economy or economic phenomena only through economics as we can observe and see heavenly bodies or microbes only through telescopes or microscopes.
  
  A revolutionary thing had happened but no economist could observe it because he was not endowed with any economics to see it. The greatness of Keynes was that he invented an intellectual tool which made it possible for us to see the great or revolutionary change that had come about.
  
  The great or revolutioary change was that we had entered into an era in which Say's Law no longer applied. Why the Law did not hold any longer was because machine production had permeated our industrial society. An automobile is made by machines; bread is baked by machines, and those automobile production machines and bread baking machines are all made by machines. Bread goes rotten so bakers have to bake them every morning; they will not lose their jobs. But the machines and the machines that made them are endurable goods and the workers who engaged in their production lose jobs because the machines do not go rotten. This is why artificial arousal of demand through governmental intervention is necessary.
  
  The third comment I would like to make is that economics is not a universal science. The economics as we have it today presupposes that man is greedy; that man is motivated rationally by the rational desire to maximize his or her monetry interest. In a differently oriented society our economics would be a laughingstock; people there would have a different economics. Economics twenty years later will largely depend on what sort of outlook on life people will have.
  
  Lastly, Keynes was not an economist and a mathematician alone; he was also a great philosopher. Even Bertrand Russell owed a part of his philosophical develoment to him.
  Economists ought to be sociologists and philosophers, too.