While driving into work this morning, a couple of interesting stories on NPR’s Morning Edition caught my ear. The first was about the Japanese experience of the 1990s. To wit, are their relevant parallels between the Japanese financial meltdown almost 20 years ago and our own today? But more to the point, what lessons might we learn from the ambitious Japanese stimulus plan to remedy the same? Well-read Corner-ites might recall a nice piece on page 1 of The New York Times a couple of weeks ago which examined this very matter. The Times did a better job than NPR on this, but what struck me was the Times’s observation, that as opposed to many western economists:

Most Japanese economists have tended to take a bleaker view of their nation’s track record, saying that Japan spent more than enough money, but wasted too much of it on roads to nowhere and other unneeded projects.

Well, NPR apparently found a Japanese economist in the minority on this matter and, as you might expect, away they went.

The second was about the glories of an electricity system drawn-up and managed by T. Boone Pickens, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and a cast of our political best-and-brightest. Color me unenthusiastic about this smart-grid jihad. “Why?” you may ask? Go over to Rob Bradley’s MasterResource blog and see.