Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics, 28

So let’s now study Werner’s findings as to how much Japan resembles cartoons. Our conclusions about which province these foundations have to be rooted in for the ensuing receipts to make their way into the corridors of power, will come as a consequence.

Werner compares hard data about United Kingdom and United States on the one hand, and Japan, Korea and Germany on the other; in the postwar era the first have had their economies shaped according to the neoclassical principles and the axiomatic and deductivist approach, while the second have had theirs shaped at odds with those principles, on the basis of an inductivist and empirical approach. The meaningfulness of this comparison is that, as testbeds too narrow may be unbalanced by contingent factors, here the structural reforms demanded for Japan had a testbed many contries wide and half a century long to prove themselves; hence the evidence in their favour should be both undeniable and abundant. Let’s see…

Time period: from 1950 to 2000.
Average real Gross Domestic Product growth percentage rate:
United States: 3.2
United Kingdom: 2.4
Germany: 4.0
Japan: 6.3
Korea: 7.6
Gini coefficient (explained below):
United States: 40.8
United Kingdom: 36.1
Germany: 30.0
Japan: 24.9
Korea: 31.6

You know how it goes with averages: they said that behind the figure of half a chicken per capita there could be half a chicken for you and half a chicken for me, but there could be a whole chicken for you and an empty plate for me as well. And here’s where the Gini coefficient above comes into play: given that whole chicken, it measures the fairness of its portions. Here it is expressed on a scale where 100 means the whole chicken in one plate and no chicken in the other, and 0 means half a chicken in both plates: the higher the number, the less fair the portions.