Now, a lot of what was called "inefficiency" in Japan my actually have been a matter of providing better customer service than we are used to in The WestTM to people who did not pay extra for it. Which would show up as lower productivity, because such things as customer service only show up in productivity statistics when somebody gets billed for it.

That gets to the problem of our social/economic ideology. Even though business people are always concerned with having a "well educated" work force, I do not believe that the costs of the production of that work force are well included, if at all, in the economic theories that are the basis for that ideology, and, in effect, that the existence of labor is an externality. On a popular level we just assume the necessary labor of the necessary skill will appear when needed, complain bitterly when it does not and assume it can go into hibernation when not needed. I hope some of the models are more sophisticated, but I doubt that the views of a majority of those who shape economic policy are. Indeed we still have adherents of old line Chicago School Economics who believe that depressions are due to people voluntarily withholding their labor from the market.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."