Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

Fortunes of all major nations have followed specific trajectories of rise and retreat, but perhaps the greatest difference in their paths has been the time they spent at the top of their performance: some had a relatively prolonged plateau followed by steady decline (both the British empire and the 20th-century United States fit this pattern); others had a swift rise to a brief peak, followed by a more or less rapid decline. Japan is clearly in the latter category. Its swift post–Second World War ascent ended in the late 1980s, and it’s been downhill ever since: in a single lifetime, from misery to an admired—and feared—economic superpower, then on to the stagnation and retreat of an aging society. The Japanese government has been trying to find some way out—but radical reforms are not easy in a gerrymandered country that still cannot seriously contemplate even moderate-scale immigration and that is yet to make real peace with its neighbors.