Event Detail

Eamonn Fingleton recently wrote a widely noted article in the New York Times Sunday Review entitled The Myth of Japan's Failure. His conclusion: "Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story." A former editor for the Financial Times in London and Forbes magazine in New York, he was almost alone among Tokyo-based Western commentators in the late 1980s in predicting the Japanese crash. Since then he has consistently argued that though many vested interests have benefited from exaggerating the crash's effects, Japan has continued to gain in competition with the United States and other rich nations, particularly in the sort of producers' goods that once defined U.S. leadership of the world economy. His 1995 book Blindside: Why Japan Is Still On Track to Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000 argued that without a massive devaluation of the dollar, Japan would replace the United States as the dominant source of the most advanced producers' goods. The book was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith, James Fallows, and Bill Clinton. His 1999 book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity was named one of the ten best business books of the year by Amazon .com. Mr. Fingleton will challenge much of the conventional wisdom about one of the world's most important and perennially baffling economies.