Capitalism, Endless Growth, and Japan

The PSU Center for Japanese Studies presents
Professor Mark Metzler, University of Washington

Japan is famous for the compressed, “catch-up” character of its industrial revolution. The salience of catching up has overshadowed the fact that for more than a century Japan has actually been at a world developmental frontier in regard to the intensity of land and resource use. Before the beginning of its modern industrialization, Japan was already an extreme example of the type of agricultural intensification theorized by Ester Boserup in the 1960s. Industrial intensification continued this pattern, culminating in a historically new type of high-speed industrial growth that has since been replicated across East Asia. In its great turn from hyper-expansion to downsizing, Japan has also been a global forerunner. This turn, which now includes a rapidly declining population, has unfolded under a financial and industrial regime that was premised on endless economic growth. One consequence of this mismatch has been the policy-led creation of enormous amounts of debt, as if new debts could be repaid out of enormous future growth. To see Japan as a country that has long been at a leading edge of modern industrial development also suggests a hopeful reading of this structural shift.

Mark Metzler is a professor of history and international studies at the University of Washington and visiting professor of global economic history at Waseda University. He is the author of Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle and, most recently, “Japan: The Arc of Industrialization,” in The New Cambridge History of Japan (2023), and “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Birth of the Business Cycle,” forthcoming in Capitalism: Histories, edited by Robert Ingram and James Vaughn.