Why Americans Cannot Take Their Own Medicine

It’s very frustrating to see the US repeating the same exact mistake that Japan made. Japan didn’t have a good parallel when they were going through their great recession in the 90s, so it’s more excusable. To a large extent, they probably didn’t know what to do. But the US has no excuse, especially because the Americans criticized the Japanese recovery plan which is basically the same plan the US has now. Paul Krugman recently said on TV that the Americans owe Japan an apology for those criticisms.

This blog post on The Economist explains why the solutions that the Americans were suggesting in the 90s were not possible for the same reason that the Americans now cannot take their own medicine.