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I think people today have a very hard time understanding what things were like during the Japan bubble from about 1987 to 1990. Coming out of the 1970s Japan e
by foobiekr 7y ago
I think people today have a very hard time understanding what things were like during the Japan bubble from about 1987 to 1990. Coming out of the 1970s Japan ended up dominating certain parts of the electronics - and especially personal electronics, like radios or portable cassette players. They had terribly failed in _information technology_ however, but most people didn't know that, what they saw was walkmen, MITI coordinating wiping out American DRAM and television producers using dumping (among other things) and so on.
Another important event was that the US dollar was very high in the mid-1980s (Reagan deliberately de-valuing the dollar was frequent discussion on the morning news). A side effect of this was the transfer of investment to other shores, and Japan being the primary beneficiary. BOJ dropped interest rates a great deal and a speculative asset and property bubble was launched. This culminated in the purchase of many, many high-profile assets in the United States by the Japanese keiretsu and banks.
The Japanese were in a mania, and a lot of investors world-wide were as well, and the Americans, in particular, were experiencing a kind of crisis of faith in US-style capitalism.
Like most bubbles (try explaining the dotcom), it is very hard to make someone understand what happened. You can recount the facts but not the emotional context.
- selimthegrim 7y agoJames Burke had a climate special (After the Warming) in about 1989-90 where his ideal future was the Japanese running things in a world government. Seems to have captured the zeitgeist and the present (creepy to hear the bit in the beginning though about "full-scale evacuation of New Orleans"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
- foobiekr 7y agoWow. This is crazy.
- selimthegrim 7y agoHis optimism is touching. The bit about carbon trading struck me. Lately I've been questioning the dogma of one man, one vote. What if the only way to democratically resolve climate change is to inversely weight your vote by the amount of carbon you emit?
- jacobush 7y agoIn about a second flat the rich will find a way to make the poor take on a lot of CO2 responsibility.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoI’m amazed that I’ve never seen this. I think this deserves an HN post of its own. Absolutely fascinating to see so much basically correct (climate refugee crisis, massive efficiency gains, enacted carbon tax, free falling PV prices, my efficient smart home setup) with so much off target (widespread telecommuting! 9 billion population! A world Japanese world government!) That seems preposterous now.
- scottlocklin 7y agoI dunno, didn't look like it got anything right to me. 6 degrees of warming and two feet of ocean, though we're only a billion and change away from 9 billion. Since when do we have a climate refugee crisis? People go to the tropics on vacation; it's fine there.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoThe current border crisis is a reasonable facsimile, same in the Mediterranean. 6 degree warming however, we are thankfully a ways away.
- scottlocklin 7y agoI think blaming the present day migrations on "climate" some how is "citations needed:" they're very obviously (to me) caused by political problems and wars the US fomented. Blowing up Libya and Honduras were shitty ideas.