Random Walk

Just when socialism was in the ashcan of history, James Fallows resurrects it in “How the World Works,” a three-part Atlantic series on Japanese industrial policy. He argues that central planners at Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) cleverly engineered a wipe-out of America’s once dominant computer semi-conductor industry in the 1980s.

Since MITI officials are the whiz kids who advised Honda to stay out of the automobile industry in the 1970s and pushed Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Hitachi to shovel tens of billions of research and development dollars down the high-density-TV rat-hole in the 1980s, how did Japanese semi-conductor firms survive their help?

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Just when socialism was in the ashcan of history, James Fallows resurrects it in “How the World Works,” a three-part Atlantic series on Japanese industrial policy. He argues that central planners at Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) cleverly engineered a wipe-out of America’s once dominant computer semi-conductor industry in the 1980s.

Since MITI officials are the whiz kids who advised Honda to stay out of the automobile industry in the 1970s and pushed Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Hitachi to shovel tens of billions of research and development dollars down the high-density-TV rat-hole in the 1980s, how did Japanese semi-conductor firms survive their help?