In Youngs most recent paper there is an evident tone of exasperation with this insistence on clinging to the conventional wisdom in the teeth of the evidence. He titles the paper The Tyranny of Numbers"--by which he means that you may not want to believe this, buster, but there's just no way around the data. He begins with an ironic introduction written in a deadpan, Sergeant Friday, Just the facts, ma' am" style: This is a fairly boring and tedious paper, and is intentionally so. This paper provides no new interpretations of the East Asian experience to interest the historian, derives no new theoretical implications of the forces behind the East Asian growth process to motivate the theorist, and draws no new policy implications from the subtleties of East Asian government intervention to excite the policy activist. Instead this paper concentrates its energies on providing a careful analysis of the historical patterns of output growth, factor accumulation, and productivity growth in the newly industrializing countries of East Of course, he is being disingenuous. His conclusion undermines most of the conventional wisdom about the future role of Asian nations in the world economy and, as a consequence, in international politics. But readers will have noticed that the statistical analysis that puts such a different interpretation on Asian growth focuses on the"tigers, the relatively small countries to whom the name"newly industrializing countries"was first applied. But what about the large countries? What about Japan and China? THE GREAT JAPANESE GROWTH SLOWDOWN Many People who are committed to the view that the destiny of the world economy lies with the Pacific Rim are likely to counter skepticism about East Asian growth prospects with the example of Japan. Here, after all, is a country that started out poor and has now come the second-largest industrial power. Why doubt that other Asian nations can do the same? There are two answers to that question. First, while many authors have written of an Asian system"--a common denominator that underlies all of the Asian success stories-- the statistical evidence tells a different story. Japans growth in the 1950s and 1960s does not resemble Singapore's growth in the 1970s and 1980s. Japan, unlike the East Asian tigers, "seems to have grown both through high rates of input growth and through high rates of efficiency growth. Today's fast-growth economies are nowhere near converging on U.S. efficiency levels, but Japan is staging an unmistakable technological catch-up Second, while Japans historical performance has indeed been remarkable, the era of miraculous Japanese growth now lies well in the past. Most years Japan still manages to grow faster than the other advanced nations, but that gap in growth rates is now fa smaller than it used to be, and is shrinking The story of the great Japanese growth slowdown has been oddly absent from the vast polemical literature on Japan and its role in the world economy. Much of that literature seems stuck in a time warp, with authors writing as if Japan were still the miracle growth economy of the 1960s and early 1970s. Granted, the severe recession that has gripped 88 In Young's most recent paper there is an evident tone of exasperation with this insistence on clinging to the conventional wisdom in the teeth of the evidence. He titles the paper "The Tyranny of Numbers"--by which he means that you may not want to believe this, buster, but there's just no way around the data. He begins with an ironic introduction, written in a deadpan, Sergeant Friday, "Just the facts, ma'am" style: "This is a fairly boring and tedious paper, and is intentionally so. This paper provides no new interpretations of the East Asian experience to interest the historian, derives no new theoretical implications of the forces behind the East Asian growth process to motivate the theorist, and draws no new policy implications from the subtleties of East Asian government intervention to excite the policy activist. Instead, this paper concentrates its energies on providing a careful analysis of the historical patterns of output growth, factor accumulation, and productivity growth in the newly industrializing countries of East Asia." Of course, he is being disingenuous. His conclusion undermines most of the conventional wisdom about the future role of Asian nations in the world economy and, as a consequence, in international politics. But readers will have noticed that the statistical analysis that puts such a different interpretation on Asian growth focuses on the "tigers," the relatively small countries to whom the name "newly industrializing countries" was first applied. But what about the large countries? What about Japan and China? THE GREAT JAPANESE GROWTH SLOWDOWN Many People who are committed to the view that the destiny of the world economy lies with the Pacific Rim are likely to counter skepticism about East Asian growth prospects with the example of Japan. Here, after all, is a country that started out poor and has now become the second-largest industrial power. Why doubt that other Asian nations can do the same? There are two answers to that question. First, while many authors have written of an "Asian system"--a common denominator that underlies all of the Asian success stories-- the statistical evidence tells a different story. Japan's growth in the 1950s and 1960s does not resemble Singapore's growth in the 1970s and 1980s. Japan, unlike the East Asian "tigers," seems to have grown both through high rates of input growth and through high rates of efficiency growth. Today's fast-growth economies are nowhere near converging on U.S. efficiency levels, but Japan is staging an unmistakable technological catch-up. Second, while Japan's historical performance has indeed been remarkable, the era of miraculous Japanese growth now lies well in the past. Most years Japan still manages to grow faster than the other advanced nations, but that gap in growth rates is now far smaller than it used to be, and is shrinking. The story of the great Japanese growth slowdown has been oddly absent from the vast polemical literature on Japan and its role in the world economy. Much of that literature seems stuck in a time warp, with authors writing as if Japan were still the miracle growth economy of the 1960s and early 1970s. Granted, the severe recession that has gripped