Jarod Taylor of American Renaissance usually references Japan as a model to base America’s future development which focuses primarily on ethnicity and race given the IQ level of Japan is generally higher then that of the US and Europe and Eurasian countries like Russia and have a more intensive educational system like cramping schools.
But could elements of Japanese labour and economic strategy be successfully implemented into other countries.
Japan has an idiosyncratic culture that is characterized by exemplary discipline and deference to hierarchy (which is criticized by individualist Westerners as being conformist), and this is crucial to making its system work.
I don't think the US should move to the Japanese model. First, because the American bureaucracy will almost certainly be incompetent at formulating a coherent industrial policy like MITI, and US comparative strengths lie more in areas like innovation and free-wheeling entrepreneurship. Second, and more importantly, as an imported "cultural asset", it will conflict with preexisting American cultural values like individual autonomy, which in my opinion is never good. Japan's rigid social order developed for a reason, they had to ensure social stability and internal peace due to preserve their environment against overpopulation. Transplanting the institutions developed by and for this social order to America, with its polarly opposite history, geography and values, does not strike me as a great idea.
That said, it is probably time for the US to declare an end to its free trade area, given the increasingly evident loss of its international competitiveness in the last decade, and to return to its protectionist past - an industrial policy which is very much a part of the American tradition.
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