Facing the Japanese Challenge

...Even when he fails to persuade, he succeeds in changing our perceptions of problems and phenomena we thought we had understood...

...Fallows further warns against recent trends that restrict various groups in our society...

...He urges a shift in government spending from entitlements to insurance, because a safety net is needed, not sinecures...

...and to the myriad ways, such as yuppie lifestyles, Americans today tend to define themselves as different from their fellow countrymen...

...The American trade deficit reflects, by contrast, President Reagan's budgetary profligacy...

...This splendid volume confirms me in my Fallowsphilia...

...Japan's culture and Japan's trade barriers are not the problem, and bashing Japan is not the solution to our troubles...

...One only has to read Junichiro Tanizaki's beautiful book, In Praise of Shadows, to see how different they truly are...

...We must also continue the impulse of immigration that so much of our unique principle of possibility derives from...

...who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways...

...Congress has just pressured President Bush into becoming a latterday Commodore Perry, threatening Japan with retaliation under the 1988 Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act if it does not change to suit our interests...

...Their flirtation with protectionism and the itch to pursue a course of " managed trade" that would confuse what is good for Motorola with what is good for the country and the world trading system, runs wholly against the thrust of the Fallows thesis...

...But the challenge from the Far East for the next century cannot be met entirely by enhancing the principle of possibility...

...author, "Protectionism" James Fallows has long been my favorite Americanjournalist...

...Fallows paints telling portraits of migrants who sought the second chance this country offers, reinventing their lives as only America enables them to do...

...Fallows, who spent a year in Japan recently for the Atlantic Monthly, urges us instead to look closer at ourselves, to renew our economic strength by recognizing our "abnormality"—our uncommon virtues, or "culture"—and fashioning solutions that build directly on it...

...Flexibility implies that opening world markets is not enough...

...Mary's, Florida...

...More important, racial discrimination has deprived blacks of access to the American dream, leaving the nation with an intolerable social stain and economic burden...

...This must be accompanied by adjustment assistance to displaced workers, giving them training and funds to grasp the second chance...

...Our children are lapsing increasingly into illiteracy...

...He can cut through complexity, yielding fresh insights where none seemed possible...

...Congressmen, who look after the larger American interests and accept honoraria from the narrower ones, should instead be paid by Common Cause to read this book...

...The poor deserve workfare, not welfare, and public school reform to improve their prospects...

...Nor can this view survive the fact that Japan's trade barriers did not increase, but actually diminished, during the period that our deficit emerged...

...Reviewed by Jagdish Bhagwati Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics, Columbia...

...It will have found the right way to elicit people's best efforts...

...They and we would both be better for it...

...The pace at which we implement technical change has slowed...

...the last stop for all those...

...These sweeping conclusions invite little disagreement, for they are essentially marked by good sense and that peculiarly un-American quality associated with older civilizations, wisdom...

...Others would rather burn the book...

...The result will be a regrettable strengthening of the nonsensical claim that the "containment of Japan" requires unconventional restraints...

...And discrimination against women has had much the same effect...

...The reality is that the Japanese trade surplus has come at the end of a period when Japan has been integrating more closely into Western culture...

...The economic progress it makes will, in turn, allow many people to have more satisfying lives...

...He adds three sketches of people who turned themselves around by "not knowing their place": Buddy and Judy Ginn, who moved from the Midwest to oilrich Alvin, Texas...

...Our savings and investment rates have collapsed to levels less than half those in Japan...

...A society that is true to its own culture will usually have a healthy economy," he points out...

...Some want to take a leaf from the exotic Pacific book...

...Clyde Prestowitz, an indefatigable proponent of "managed trade," has asserted that Japan, by virtue of cultural factors, is impenetrable, and consequently there will always be a tendency toward a Japanese surplus in the balance of trade...

...He describes his own family's move when he was five from the East Coast to the small town of Redlands, California...

...More Like Us starts with the celebrated cliché of the decade: The Far East threatens our premier status in the world economy...

...What we have to do, says Fallows, is "reopen America"—revive the optimism that Americans are capable of to stimulate personal gain and benefit the public good...

...But it ends with an original response...

...Civil rights enforcement and affirmative action, which provide the entrée and the role models that help extend the principle of possibility to blacks and women, acquire credibility from More Like Us...

...Heobserves what many miss, often shaping a mosaic of luminous and compelling design...

...He alerts us to the increasing educational prerequisites demanded by the prof essions on entry, although in fact there is little evidence that this education correlates with performance...

...Substantial deregulation of the professions is necessary so that competence, not formal educational background, becomes the relevant entry factor...

...But it is wrong to infer that they do not belong to the human race whose economic behavior Adam Smith fashioned into the principles of political economy...

...If that is true, it is astonishing that it took nearly a century after Commodore Perry opened up Japan for this inevitable surplus to develop...

...The Japanese trade surplus reflects the excess of high personal savings over domestic investment that began to occur in the late 1970s, thanks to a reduced investment rate in the wake of the economic upheavals caused by OPEC...

...The widely-held belief that Japan's trade barriers—some overt, many inscrutable and covert—account for our trade deficit is not validated by any economic theory...

...the Nguyens, who fled from Vietnam to Los Angeles...

...When social mobility gave way to class in enabling the educated to avoid the Vietnam draft, the consequence was the prolonged continuation of a serious and debilitating war...

...This is the California that was devastated by Joan Didion in the Saturday Evening Post as a wasteland "where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion, but hard to buy a book...

...If we do not address these underlying sources of our long-term economic malaise, we shall without question lose the race with the Pacific nations...

...If Fallows is to be faulted, it is for excessive concessions he makes concerning the primacy of culture and its stranglehold on economic behavior...

...The new Democrats urge us to adopt the industrial policy that Japan presumably practices and we do not...

...Japan gets the most out of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed...

...The Republicans would profit equally...

...Fallows celebrates the flip side—the seizure of new opportunities, the remaking of one's destiny—with greater insight...

...Fallows is fundamentally correct in asking us to look within ourselves for our strength...

...America's uniqueness lies in the pervasiveness of "possibility," the principle of social mobility that has led to continuous seeking of new chances in a tradition where constraints inspire challenge and not accommodation—a virtual celebration of disorder...

...Certainly the Japanese are different from us...

...America has been weakened, Fallows argues, whenever it has denied the concept of possibility—and the attendant notion that anyone can succeed, therefore no one is inherently better or entitled to deference...

...Itis precisely this non sequitur that Fallows' fascination with cultural difference is likely to encourage...

...The Democrats would profit from the author's insistence on flexibility of response to pressing domestic problems, reinforced by suitable social policies...

...and Wyman Westbury, who fought at great odds against the establishment in a company town in St...

...America, by getting out of their way so that they can adjust individually, allows them to succeed...

...Indeed, it is easy to miss the freshness of Fallows' prescriptions precisely because they appear so reasonable...

...to the IQ tyranny which, unscientifically but forcefully, reduces large numbers to a falsely "objective" inferiority that limits their sense of the possible...

...We need to do much more, to complement individual striving with social action in many other ways...