> So drop the snobbery. I know the history better than you do. Then stop pretending to be confused when I allude to cases that ought to be extremely familiar t

> So drop the snobbery. I know the history better than you do. Then stop pretending to be confused when I allude to cases that ought to be extremely familiar to anyone who's read up on this topic? And stop making plainly-crap lines of argument like "it's hardly possible not to hit a home run" when a country is rebuilt after being destroyed when that's just... extremely not true, and the Miracle is such a big deal precisely because it's remarkable (though not unique—I'll go ahead and pre-empt the attack against a thing I didn't claim, given the tone of this exchange), and it's interesting and comes up all the time because it points to limitations of various simplistic models of what should work and what should not (like, say, the notion of government direction of technological development being categorically a bad idea). How has Japan done since 1990? What, is your argument that government-driven technological direction in the 60s and 70s is a key factor in the later malaise, rather than its being mostly irrelevant to that phase? Even if it was, my point was never that "this approach cannot possibly go wrong"! This is a narrow piece of the puzzle. You're not engaging with the substance, you're just casting about for gotchas. So what? > So it's the sarcasm you object to? I guess that's all you've got. Look, I'm done. You're not reading or posting in good faith, if that's what you've taken away from this.