The Luddites were right; they were just early. As for the 1930s and onwards, I once described the Japanese war in China as indefensible even from a narrowly ec

The Luddites were right; they were just early. As for the 1930s and onwards, I once described the Japanese war in China as indefensible even from a narrowly economic perspective, because developing Manchuria was enough to absorb Japanese industrial productivity for the next thirty or forty years. That phrase is historians' standard way of describing what the Japanese wanted to do, but it was an absolute revelation to a non-historian friend of mine, who realized from that phrase that industrial productivity has been a waste product for the past eighty years or so...