No Thanks for the "Least Unhappy Society"
We devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.
- from "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" by John Maynard Keynes
Sometimes I even ask him for a small subsidy. But I find some consolation in the fact that if money should matter in life at all, he still owes me much more than I owe him.
He is a typical people person. Perhaps he doesn't have his own set of values. Even if he has one, he buries it deep inside so he can get along very well with everyone surrounding him. To borrow Keynesian words, he always follows "the average opinion."
It is true that I can attribute his group orientation and propensity toward mediocrity to the education he received from my ex, former in-laws and teachers in his early childhood.
On the one hand, the guiding principle for Japanese educators is something similar to the No Child Left Behind policy in the U.S. But on the other, also at work there is a Japan-particular way of thinking that any child who sticks out of the standard should be mercilessly hammered down.
At the end of the day, I must admit that it's me who was really at fault for what my sons have grown into. Simply put, I shouldn't have fathered them in this country in the first place.
Over time I've had to learn how to avoid futile disputes with him. The most important thing is not to discuss politics or any other serious issues. Whenever it's unavoidable to touch on a serious topic, I always make believe I'm just cracking a joke.
I do know he is opposed to the policy lines of the two major political parties and that his take on the Japanese way of life as a whole is not miles apart from his dad's. But that does not help because in our heart of hearts, we are divided over fundamental values. He is on the other side, too. By now I've chosen to remain just his friend.
Recently he is trying to talk me into moving to the apartment he plans to purchase to live with him, his CRPS-suffering wife and mother, i.e. my ex. (CRPS stands for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.) He says he would never interfere with my life. Yet I find his terms and conditions unacceptable because I know by experience that his Laissez-Faire policy is a trick, if a well-intended one. I would certainly lose more than I would gain if I complied.
Not that he would win. Any proposition is doomed to end up in a lose-lose deal in a society where everyone has lost his innate spontaneity and attitude of self-reliance.
All these people do is what they are supposed to do.
In those turbulent years on the eve of the revision of the U.S.-Japanese security treaty, I majored in economics in Keio University. More often than not I skipped classes because they were intolerably boring.
Like anywhere else, lectures Keio professors could deliver were empty theories they had borrowed or stolen from John Maynard Keynes or Karl Marx. In fact, though, Japan has never been a capitalist or socialist state.
By the same token, this country has never been a welfare state in the sense the postwar U.K. was under the Labour administration.
Japan has remained Japan all the time.
The only lecture that impressed me was one about Adam Smith I was listening to in my sophomore year. His theory said that only the Invisible Hand ensures a world where prevails what German philosopher Gottfried Leipniz termed the "preestablished harmony".
On the contrary I have never been really convinced by the Keynesian theory which the British economist thought was the only workable prescription for the problems facing the post-Great Depression world.
Actually when I became a corporate warrior 51 years ago, I found out that the Invisible Hand was still there and would remain there until the end of time. It seemed to me I couldn't initiate any principled action without assuming the preestablished harmony is always there.
Especially after I became a senior manager, I thought I was there not to respond to someone else's initiative, but to act on my own.
This is exactly where I parted ways with Japanese businesspeople. Also this is why so many American friends would leave me in later years. They say my fundamentalism is too idyllic, but I find their unprincipled way of doing things utterly idiotic.
After going through the two major financial crises in the last eighty years, people take it for granted that every government, be it Obama's, Hatoyama's or Kan's, is mandated to look after its people and supervise businesses they are working at. In this sickly climate, they are obsessed with the absurd idea that they should wetnurse each other around the clock.
In 1936 Keynes famously likened the mechanism at work in the post-Depression stock markets to a beauty contest where the one who voted for the winning girl is awarded a prize. Which girl you think is the prettiest does not matter at all. What really counts is what you expect other people to think, or even what you expect other people to expect some others to think.
My interpretation of his analogy is that we would see a chaos in the apparent absence of the Invisible Hand unless the government meddles in private business activities.
Actually I wouldn't have given a damn whether or not other people had voted for my wife because it's none of their business what sense of values I live for, and die for. To me the "average opinion" is nothing but nobody's opinion.
Yesterday we saw Japan's "rebirth" after the same old misogi ritual.
Naoto Kan, the new prime minister, said in his stupid inaugural address that the goal of his administration is to create a society with 最小不幸 (saisho fuko, or the least unhappiness in Daily Yomiuri's translation.) The moron will never understand what should be minimized is not people's unhappiness, but the size and roles of the government.
His inaugural crap is yet another confirmation that the Invisible Hand will remain literally invisible here for many more decades.
Kan's immediate predecessor Hatoyama kept talking about 友愛社会 (yuai shakai, or a society filled with the spirit of fraternity,) the hogwash he has inherited from his equally loopy grandfather.
These guys are too much used to dealing with people whose hearts and minds are manipulable so easily that Japan doesn't need the Invisible Hand at all.
With his strikingly odd phrase, Kan was just referring to nobody's unhappiness. ·
- from "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" by John Maynard Keynes
 Keynes used a beauty contest analogy when he described the mechanism to determine stock prices | I am not going to get really used to this sense of alienation. Now I see a growing number of my kin and local friends on the other side of the chasm lying before me. Also I see there some American names and faces which were on this side before Obama's way of thinking (or not thinking, to be more precise) swept them away. On Sunday I spent the whole afternoon at my elder son's place. He is a very caring person. From time to time I have to count on him to do physical tasks this Parkinson's sufferer can't do himself, such as cleansing the filters of the air conditioner. |
He is a typical people person. Perhaps he doesn't have his own set of values. Even if he has one, he buries it deep inside so he can get along very well with everyone surrounding him. To borrow Keynesian words, he always follows "the average opinion."
It is true that I can attribute his group orientation and propensity toward mediocrity to the education he received from my ex, former in-laws and teachers in his early childhood.
On the one hand, the guiding principle for Japanese educators is something similar to the No Child Left Behind policy in the U.S. But on the other, also at work there is a Japan-particular way of thinking that any child who sticks out of the standard should be mercilessly hammered down.
At the end of the day, I must admit that it's me who was really at fault for what my sons have grown into. Simply put, I shouldn't have fathered them in this country in the first place.
Over time I've had to learn how to avoid futile disputes with him. The most important thing is not to discuss politics or any other serious issues. Whenever it's unavoidable to touch on a serious topic, I always make believe I'm just cracking a joke.
I do know he is opposed to the policy lines of the two major political parties and that his take on the Japanese way of life as a whole is not miles apart from his dad's. But that does not help because in our heart of hearts, we are divided over fundamental values. He is on the other side, too. By now I've chosen to remain just his friend.
Recently he is trying to talk me into moving to the apartment he plans to purchase to live with him, his CRPS-suffering wife and mother, i.e. my ex. (CRPS stands for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.) He says he would never interfere with my life. Yet I find his terms and conditions unacceptable because I know by experience that his Laissez-Faire policy is a trick, if a well-intended one. I would certainly lose more than I would gain if I complied.
Not that he would win. Any proposition is doomed to end up in a lose-lose deal in a society where everyone has lost his innate spontaneity and attitude of self-reliance.
All these people do is what they are supposed to do.
In those turbulent years on the eve of the revision of the U.S.-Japanese security treaty, I majored in economics in Keio University. More often than not I skipped classes because they were intolerably boring.
Like anywhere else, lectures Keio professors could deliver were empty theories they had borrowed or stolen from John Maynard Keynes or Karl Marx. In fact, though, Japan has never been a capitalist or socialist state.
By the same token, this country has never been a welfare state in the sense the postwar U.K. was under the Labour administration.
Japan has remained Japan all the time.
The only lecture that impressed me was one about Adam Smith I was listening to in my sophomore year. His theory said that only the Invisible Hand ensures a world where prevails what German philosopher Gottfried Leipniz termed the "preestablished harmony".
On the contrary I have never been really convinced by the Keynesian theory which the British economist thought was the only workable prescription for the problems facing the post-Great Depression world.
Actually when I became a corporate warrior 51 years ago, I found out that the Invisible Hand was still there and would remain there until the end of time. It seemed to me I couldn't initiate any principled action without assuming the preestablished harmony is always there.
Especially after I became a senior manager, I thought I was there not to respond to someone else's initiative, but to act on my own.
This is exactly where I parted ways with Japanese businesspeople. Also this is why so many American friends would leave me in later years. They say my fundamentalism is too idyllic, but I find their unprincipled way of doing things utterly idiotic.
After going through the two major financial crises in the last eighty years, people take it for granted that every government, be it Obama's, Hatoyama's or Kan's, is mandated to look after its people and supervise businesses they are working at. In this sickly climate, they are obsessed with the absurd idea that they should wetnurse each other around the clock.
In 1936 Keynes famously likened the mechanism at work in the post-Depression stock markets to a beauty contest where the one who voted for the winning girl is awarded a prize. Which girl you think is the prettiest does not matter at all. What really counts is what you expect other people to think, or even what you expect other people to expect some others to think.
My interpretation of his analogy is that we would see a chaos in the apparent absence of the Invisible Hand unless the government meddles in private business activities.
Actually I wouldn't have given a damn whether or not other people had voted for my wife because it's none of their business what sense of values I live for, and die for. To me the "average opinion" is nothing but nobody's opinion.
Yesterday we saw Japan's "rebirth" after the same old misogi ritual.
Naoto Kan, the new prime minister, said in his stupid inaugural address that the goal of his administration is to create a society with 最小不幸 (saisho fuko, or the least unhappiness in Daily Yomiuri's translation.) The moron will never understand what should be minimized is not people's unhappiness, but the size and roles of the government.
His inaugural crap is yet another confirmation that the Invisible Hand will remain literally invisible here for many more decades.
Kan's immediate predecessor Hatoyama kept talking about 友愛社会 (yuai shakai, or a society filled with the spirit of fraternity,) the hogwash he has inherited from his equally loopy grandfather.
These guys are too much used to dealing with people whose hearts and minds are manipulable so easily that Japan doesn't need the Invisible Hand at all.
With his strikingly odd phrase, Kan was just referring to nobody's unhappiness. ·