Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future To Japan & How To Reclaim It

by Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr.

A leading international business expert, former trade negotiator, and lifelong student of Japanese culture shows how America is abdicating its future to Japan and offers some practical solutions for reversing this trend. Selected by Business Week as one of the ten best business books of the year.

Genres: Economics, Japan, History, Business, Politics

592 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Clyde Prestowitz (born 1941) is the founder and President of the Economic Strategy Institute. He formerly served as counselor to the Secretary of Commerce in the Reagan Administration. He is a labor economist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_V....

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

16 years later, with Japan's economy in the dumper and their economic prospects looking almost as bad as ours, you might be tempted to think that Prestowitz was misguided in some way when he wrote this in 1993. You'd be very wrong. If the US had taken the prescriptions that Prestowitz has been peddling for the past 25 years or so, we would absolutely not be in the mess we're in now.

We probably never will be able to implement any of Prestowitz's good ideas because they require long-term sustained direct government involvement in our country's more important business ventures and sustained investment in strategic economic directions that don't have immediate payoffs for investors (like education, for example), and that's never going to happen in this wacky 2-party pendulum system we have, especially when both parties are guided first and foremost by the short-term get-richer-quick demands of their shared constituencies.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for research on a 1980s story I'm trying to hash out. While the early chapters do outline some very useful economic data on how America significantly understimated Japan in the early 1980s on the semiconductor front, the well-connected Prestowitz never quite finds his groove here. This ends up becoming a repetitive series of desiccated platitudes and tedious generalizations. You're honestly better off with David Halberstam's THE RECKONING.

[Timothy Fewless · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great summery of the difficulties in trade with Japan

[Kurishin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, despite the publishing date, remains relevant today. Prestowitz' analysis of Japanese business culture and related structural issues is poignant. Furthermore, his analysis of American structural trade and economic issues is as well. He was aware of excesses in the Japanese financial system in the 1980's even if he did not see how they would play out over the next decades. Japanese hubris in the late 1980's was peaking and it is interesting to see how that is represented in this book. That Japan, in my opinion, has largely failed over the last decades to overcome its economic and industrial weaknesses is not predicted here but that relates to the hubris comment above and can be related to China's economic development over the last decade. There is much more to this book that I'm not capturing here.

[Rebekah Sheppard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely enlightening about what American defines as National Security, and what it sells out to pursue that goal. I still refer to this book even nearly 30 years since I've read it - very relevant today.