Japan at the Crossroads
by Hazel Henderson
Japan faces a snap election on December 14thwith Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” on trial. From the conventional economics perspective of GDP-measured growth, we are told that Japan is “stagnating” with excessive debt. Economists dispense their usual bromides: “open up the economy”; “join the Transpacific Partnershp”; “cut government spending”; “tax more”; “tax less”; “print money” – lurching between austerity and stimulus.
As I wrote in August 2001 in Nikkei Ecology, from a futurist’s perspective all this advice is nonsensical and today even more so. Japan is still undergoing the now global transition of mature industrial economies from short-term material economic growth at whatever social and environmental costs – to a more mature, long-term, system-wide social development. As other countries in Europe, North America and now China, India and Brazil face the same breakdown of GDP-growth policies, new national scorecards and metrics of company success are emerging.
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Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, founder of Ethical Markets Media, is a futurist, evolutionary economist and author of award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. She leads the Transforming Finance initiative, created the Green Transition Scoreboard®, tracking global private sector investment in green tech, and developed with Calvert Group the widely used alternative to GNP, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. In 2010 she was honored as one of the “Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior 2010” by Trust Across America.
