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Dogs and Demons
The subtitle is Tales from the Dark Side of Japan and the author is Alex Kerr. It is recommended reading for those who would have Obama expand his stimulus plan to include more construction. Here are some strung-together excerpts:
Few have questioned why Japan's supposed "cities of the future" are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason...or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles...
Led by bureaucrats on automatic pilot, the nation has carried certain policies -- namely construction -- to extremes that would be comical were they not also at times terrifying...
Dozens of government agencies owe their existence solely to thinking up new ways of sculpting the earth. Planned spending on public works for the decade 1995-2005 will come to an astronomical...$6.2 trillion, three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population, will spend on public construction in the same period.
...from an economic point of view the majority of the civil-engineering works do not address real needs. All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense.
...The construction industry here is so powerful that Japanese commentators often describe their country as doken kokka, a "construction state."...the millions of jobs supported by construction are not jobs created by real growth but "make work," paid for by government handouts. These are filled by people who could have been employed in services, software, and other advanced industries.
Kerr provides almost four hundred pages of documentation for these claims and more. In the meantime, I am pondering the question of whether government in the United States is of higher quality than government in Japan. I believe it can be argued either way.
Addendum: Here is my previous post on fiscal policy in Japan.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 13, 2009 at 06:13 AM in History | Permalink
Comments
All of this rings true to me, except the characterisation of Kyoto (and Nara? Never been) as a "concrete jungle." It's certainly not been preserved as it was at the end of the bakufu, but it's not like it's been turned into a dystopian tangle of skyscrapers and overpasses and concrete construction like, say, Los Angeles. There's modern buildings and there's historic buildings and temples and whatnot, side by side. Like most Japanese cities, the new construction is mostly low to mid-rise, so it's not even like it really overpowers the old stuff. In addition, the city has a nice, easy to use subway system and good rail connections (probably thanks to LDP construction boondoggles). Maybe it's different for people actually living there, but from an American perspective, it's a good sight better than most of our cities.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Jan 13, 2009 7:23:51 AM
So why is no one advocating using the stimulus money to tear down unwanted construction? The only other place I saw it mentioned was at The Big Picture, but I'm not sure if they were serious.
Posted by: Jason at Jan 13, 2009 7:35:16 AM
I have always understood that Japanese politcal parties, esp. the LDP, are very dependant on construction firms for financing and votes, to a level that American parties clearly are not. Perhaps the relationship between American politics and defense firms comes closer, I can't judge on that.
Posted by: Zamfir at Jan 13, 2009 7:51:46 AM
It would be really great if all of the still-in-office and still prominent Democrats who were
telling us 20 years ago (It was a big issue in 1988) how the U.S. was going to fall behind the
Japanese because of Japan's MITI could be flogged in public for economic malpractice.
Unfortunately, most of the people believing, without the slightest bit of reasonable skepticism
in the 2008 version of the benevolent & wise big brother (aka "hope and change") are to young to
to remember Dukakis and the gang.
Posted by: Superheater at Jan 13, 2009 10:13:28 AM
From Zamfir:
I have always understood that Japanese politcal parties, esp. the LDP, are very dependant on construction firms for financing and votes, to a level that American parties clearly are not.
This is, no doubt, true, but which came first- the dependency or the plan to pour concrete all over the islands? I would argue for the latter, and if we go down the path of vastly increased public construction, we, too, will end up with politically powerful construction interests that kick back a portion of the profits to the politicians appropriating the funds.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Jan 13, 2009 10:26:42 AM
The cross-country comparisons to the US are somewhat limited. Undoubtedly there is waste but much of it is specific to the Japanese political system where the construction industry has unbalanced political power to pull in subsidies much like the farm lobby currently in the US. The power of the Western states in the 19th century to force changes to monetary policy to benefit a very small number of silver producers also comes to mind.
You could also very easily argue that the US has significantly uninvested in infrastructure for the same period.
Posted by: asiequana at Jan 13, 2009 10:27:24 AM
I already wonder how much the concrete industry affects the construction/expansion of freeways and toll-roads (along with their useless "noise walls") in my home state or Texas.
Posted by: RWB at Jan 13, 2009 10:29:18 AM
In the times of Japan's spectacular economic growth, I recall noting with surprise that all the relevant indicators suggested that Japanese construction was notably inefficient by international standards. In the downturn, that and the political connections of the industry may have made it may have made it a particularly attractive corner for 'job creation' even thogh those jobs had no long term future (Detroit will undrstand).
As a prudent bureacrat (like many of my former Japanese confrères), I have noted that in the next Japanese prolonged recession, there is an obvious job creation opportunity in the demolition and disappearance of many of these constructed scars on a beautiful landscape.
Posted by: D iversity at Jan 13, 2009 10:32:37 AM
perhaps we should build something cantankerously unstable and theoretically unuseful so as not to emulate the japanese.
Posted by: babar at Jan 13, 2009 10:33:10 AM
Yancey: This is, no doubt, true, but which came first- the dependency or the plan to pour concrete all over the islands?
That's indeed the question, and I could be wrong just from memory, but I think the LDP already had unusually strong connections with builders before the enormous expenditures of the nineties, in the sense that construction work was the usual Japanese way to channel pork to a district and get votes in return. Again, not too unsimilar to the way American system uses defense contracts.
Posted by: Zamfir at Jan 13, 2009 10:54:29 AM
"I am pondering the question of whether government in the United States is of higher quality than government in Japan. I believe it can be argued either way. "
This is nonsensical. It has nothing to do with the "quality" of government today; the outcome is a result of the incentives of government as it spends money it is entrusted with, via the policies.
As Kerr says:
"All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense."
The same would be true in the US were we to have the same policies.
Posted by: liberty at Jan 13, 2009 12:30:20 PM
Obama will end up paving over more of the country than anybody since Eisenhower. The irony brings a smile to my face.
Hopefully, most of the paving will be done in small to mid-sized cities. Raleigh can get the outer ring road completed. We also need a coastal interstate highway from Savannah to Virginia Beach.
I see in DC/NoVa the metro line to Dulles will get some ObamaBucks. Insanely expensive, but fine.
What we really need to do is pave over the 75% of the Everglades. It takes up like a 1/4 of the state and is just useless. A lot of people would like to live there.
The ROI on draining the Everglades would be huge. The 25% left over would still be massive and plenty big for the eco-tourists.
The last big thing we need is to spend the ObamaBucks on getting some nice virgin land. We should just make a huge cash offer for Baja California and Cuba. Baja California is rightfully ours anyway. Think of all the highways we could build there. A subway line all the way from San Diego. Maybe a monorail.
As for Cuba, once we buyout the Castro family with our ObamaBucks, I have a plan to revitalize the economy with millions of constructions jobs. Two words: land bridge.
My estimates are that we'd need 12.3 million construction workers to rip up the Appalachian Mountains (ideally by hand or with tactical nukes), transport the rocks to Key West, and build a land bridge to Cuba. The last couple miles would start on the Cuba side and be made primarily of 1957 Chevy's.
If we have money left over we can try some or cutting edge ideas, like an overland connector route from Seattle to Alaska. My research says Canada technically doesn't own the airspace 20ft over British Columbia so we'd be perfectly within our rights to build a floating highway from Seattle to Alaska. Now, we cannot build supporting structures, so it would have to be held aloft by Zeppelins every 110 meters. Alternatively, we could tether it with space elevators, but the Zeppelins every 110 meters is a proven technology, so I say stick with what works.
;-)
Posted by: jim at Jan 13, 2009 1:06:54 PM
The outskirts of Nara are a concrete jungle of incredible extent and ugliness, I thought, when riding through them on a bus on the way to visit an old temple complex/museum. Don't know about Kyoto, but the outskirts of Osaka are similarly nightmarish.
Something is truly amiss there.
Posted by: Harold at Jan 13, 2009 2:17:47 PM
Yeah Harold and U.S. Cities are lovely.......At least you wont' get rolled or whacked in a Japanese City....We are spinning into 3rd wold status and you call Japanese Cities ugly. I will fly you to Detroit Harold.
Posted by: Robertindc at Jan 13, 2009 2:58:16 PM
"I have always understood that Japanese politcal parties, esp. the LDP, are very dependant on construction firms for financing and votes, to a level that American parties clearly are not."
The closest thing to the LDP in American when it comes to a symbiotic relationship with the infrastructure construction business is the Chicago Democratic Party, which explains a lot about Obama's focus on filling potholes and the like.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jan 13, 2009 3:41:42 PM
Japanese cities are lovely. The ugliness is hidden. We rode through these hideous suburbs and were impressed by the courtesy of the bus driver and the people getting on and off, even as we were shocked at the relentless concrete landscape devoid of even a touch of greenery.
Posted by: Harold at Jan 13, 2009 4:49:16 PM
perhaps we should build something cantankerously unstable and theoretically unuseful so as not to emulate the japanese.
Posted by: babar at Jan 13, 2009 10:33:10 AM
Babar, I believe the construction of the modern GOP began under Reagen and Associates approximately 30 years ago.
Posted by: nickzi at Jan 13, 2009 7:51:18 PM
t would be really great if all of the still-in-office and still prominent Democrats who were
telling us 20 years ago (It was a big issue in 1988) how the U.S. was going to fall behind the
Japanese because of Japan's MITI could be flogged in public for economic malpractice.
Posted by: Superheater at Jan 13, 2009 10:13:28 AM
Superheater, this version of the MITI miracle was being touted on all sides, not just that of the Democrats. I can assure you that it dominated academia, think-tanks, international politics fora etc. It's a little silly to blame the Democrats for something which was very much the dominant meme throughout the intellectual and industrial worlds.
Posted by: meganmcardle at Jan 13, 2009 7:54:45 PM
There is no question that the construction section of Kerr's book was the strongest. The rest of his claims were fairly disposable. At this date, though, I wonder if his claims about construction carry quite the same impact.
When he wrote the book and railed against public spending on bridges it seemed like a great point. Now, years later, a major bridge has collapsed in the US, TRIP reports that "26 percent of bridges are 'structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.'"
Who is to say that the Japanese level of infrastructure spending is wrong and the US levels are right? Kerr starts with the assumption that America has adequately allocated its spending and deviations from it are suspect. It is a not terribly subtle bias that pervades his entire book.
Posted by: Justus at Jan 13, 2009 7:58:45 PM
All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense.
Err, not quite. They're built by the construction industry, for the construction industry.
I've always thought that one of the reasons small government stances are more popular in the US than in Europe is because US government administration is so bad compared to Europe (where the best and brightest managers go into the civil service rather than into business). Americans think all government is very inefficient because their's is. But that leaves the puzzle of why the Japanese aren't all for small government ....
Posted by: derrida derider at Jan 13, 2009 11:39:08 PM
Japan certainly has serious problems with useless public works projects destroying every last scrap of natural beauty the country has, but I don't see any relation at all to Obama's plan.
Environmentalists and citizens groups in the United States have far more power than their counterparts in Japan. Destructive public works projects on such a large scale would never, ever be tolerated.
Posted by: James at Jan 14, 2009 4:10:09 AM
I actually just finished this book today. Some of it is true, especially the environmental and construction sections (the first couple chapters). Other things, he starts sounding like a snob. The architecture part is really whiny.
The biggest lesson to learn from it is the inertia bureaucracy can attain, where it just keeps doing the same thing over and over, relentlessly. I see the US being a bit less likely to have that happen, especially if Obama says, "OK guys, we have this much to spend, and not a penny more. Here you go." Not likely, but who knows.
And as someone who lives here, Japan can be UGLY. It can also be very beautiful, if you escape the city.
Oh, and one last thing: Japanese house construction sucks donkey balls. I'm freezing.
Posted by: Jeremy at Jan 14, 2009 4:53:17 AM
I once made up an Alex Kerr drinking game where you have to take a shot each time you read the word "concrete."
Warning: Don't try this -- by page 10 you will be vomiting on the floor.
Posted by: Joe Jones at Jan 14, 2009 5:22:13 AM
That's indeed the question, and I could be wrong just from memory, but I think the LDP already had unusually strong connections with builders before the enormous expenditures of the nineties, in the sense that construction work was the usual Japanese way to channel pork to a district and get votes in return. Again, not too unsimilar to the way American system uses defense contracts.
I think it's actually dramatically different from the way defense contracts are used in the US. Defense contracts really only affect a few congressional districts (most districts do not house a major defense contractor or large numbers of defense jobs). Similarly, although the proportion of states with defense contractors in them is much higher than the proportion of congressional districts, it's still not all that high. American politicians mostly don't use defense contracts to buy votes -- they use them to get political donations from defense contractors. Or bribes (e.g. Rep. Cunningham).
Japanese Construction, on the other hand, is something applicable to basically every district -- it's a catch-all industry that the LDP can use anywhere, anytime, if it needs to buy votes somewhere. And they get kickbacks in the form of political donations. Or bribes. This is, as others have pointed out above, much closer to the farm or failed automaker subsidies in the US.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Jan 14, 2009 1:20:33 PM
America is different from Japan.
Here we have environmentalists who will file lawsuits to block construction of hydroelectric projects because they imperil the habitat of a 3 inch long fish called the Snail Darter. They insure that voluminous environmental impact reports need to be filed and public hearings held before the first shovelful of earth is turned. And what's more, those environmentalists are Obama supporters.
I predict that if Obama tries to engage in a massive building program the only thing that will be created is a massive pile of paperwork.
pcc
Posted by: Patrick C at Jan 14, 2009 4:25:40 PM
