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01 / 03
Centers of Progress, Pt. 30: Tokyo (Technology)

Blog Post | Science & Technology

Centers of Progress, Pt. 30: Tokyo (Technology)

The city has become synonymous with cutting-edge technology.

Today marks the thirtieth installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.

Our thirtieth Center of Progress is Tokyo, which, after it was nearly destroyed during World War II, was rapidly rebuilt and reinvented itself as a world leader in manufacturing and technology.

Today, Tokyo is its country’s economic center and the seat of the Japanese government. The city is famously safe and prosperous. It is renowned for its glamor and cosmopolitanism. The Greater Tokyo Area is currently the most populous metropolitan area in the world, boasting well over 37 million residents. As our final Center of Progress, Tokyo’s large population is appropriate because, as in every city, it is the people who live there who drive progress and create wealth. And the more people, the merrier—a finding also backed up by empirical research.

Situated on Tokyo Bay, the metropolis began as a humble fishing village. Originally named Edo, meaning estuary, the area first rose to prominence when it was designated as the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. By the 18th century, the once-obscure locale had grown into one of the world’s most populous cities with a population of over a million people.

The city benefited from a lengthy peace known as the Pax Tokugawa, which let the city’s people devote their resources to economic development rather than military defense. That was particularly fortunate because the city often had to be rebuilt after disasters. The city was vulnerable to fires, thanks to its predominantly wooden architecture, as well as earthquakes – a consequence of Japan’s location along the so-called Ring of Fire, the most earthquake-prone zone on Earth. Tokyo’s ability to thrive when spared from the vicissitudes of conflict is a recurring theme in the city’s story.

When the Tokugawa shogunate ended in 1868, the newly empowered imperial court moved to Edo and renamed the city Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital,” a reference to the previous capital city of Kyoto, which is located nearly 300 miles to Tokyo’s west. As the headquarters of the new regime, Tokyo was at the forefront of the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), an era of Japanese history characterized by rapid modernization. In just a few decades, the country abolished feudal privileges and industrialized its economy, becoming a modern state complete with paved roads, telephones, and steam power. During the subsequent Taisho era (1912-1926), Tokyo continued to expand as Japan urbanized and modernized further.

In 1923, disaster struck the city. The Great Kanto Earthquake, which measured a 7.9 on the Richter scale, caused a fire whirl and burned down the city center. Over 140,000 people perished in the catastrophe, and around 300,000 homes were destroyed. At the time, it was the worst tragedy the city had ever experienced. But just over two decades later, the catastrophe was superseded by the far worse devastation wrought by World War II.

Japan was among the countries most devastated by World War II, losing between 1.8 and 2.8 million people as well as a quarter of the nation’s wealth. The country sustained damage not only from nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also from an extremely effective campaign of conventional bombing of some of its biggest cities, including Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe—and Tokyo. Operation Meetinghouse (March 1945), or the Great Tokyo Air Raid, is considered to be the single most destructive bombing raid of World War II. It was deadlier than the bombings of Dresden or Hamburg and even the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The low-altitude incendiary raid claimed the lives of at least 100,000 Tokyoites, wounded over 40,000 others, burned a quarter of the city to the ground, and left a million people homeless. Temperatures reached 1,800 degrees on the ground in some parts of Tokyo, and the city’s mainly wooden structures quickly disappeared in flames. And that was just one of the multiple firebombings that the city suffered during the war. In addition to being the target of World War II’s deadliest bombing, Tokyo was also a target of what was likely the single largest bombing raid in history, involving over a thousand planes.

The firebombings collectively cut Tokyo’s economic output in half. As a whole, Japan’s industrial production was reduced to a tenth of its prewar levels. Industrial and commercial buildings and machinery were particularly likely to have been destroyed during the war.

That destruction contributed to wide-ranging postwar food and energy shortages, and infrastructure damage made transportation to some areas almost impossible. Combined with the abrupt demobilization of the country’s 7.6 million soldiers, approximately 4 million civilians engaged in war-related work, and 1.5 million returnees from territories that Japan occupied during the war, the devastation contributed to already massive unemployment. With over 13 million people out of work in the country as a whole, rampant inflation, and currency devaluation, Tokyo’s economy came to an effective standstill.

Despite the grim situation, postwar Tokyo also had a few advantages that favored quick recovery. Prewar Japan had been a major power. The capital city maintained an institutional memory of what it was like to be an industrial center and still possessed an educated and skilled workforce. The American Occupation Administration was also highly motivated to help with the economic turnaround, as the United States was invested in seeing the country’s swift demilitarization and democratization.

The United States forced Japan to surrender its right to a military and assumed the cost of the country’s defense, thus allowing Japan to allocate its full resources toward civilian activities such as commercial investment. Many Japanese leaders, such as Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida (1878–1967), fully supported demilitarization. He is sometimes called the father of the modern Japanese economy. Even after Japan established a national defense force in 1954, the expense was small and shrank as a portion of GDP over the years. Some economists estimate that Japan’s economy would have been 30 percent smaller by 1976 if it had not been freed from the burden of military spending.

Japan swiftly enacted several economic reforms. The Allies compelled the country to disband the zaibatsu, the crony-capitalist conglomerates that had received preferential treatment from the imperial government ranging from lower tax rates to cash stimulus injections. Because of their entanglement with the government, the zaibatsu had managed to maintain a near-monopoly over vast swathes of the economy and crush competitors. Ending the reign of the zaibatsu allowed new companies to form and compete in a more open economy. At the same time, Japan passed land reforms that transformed the country’s agriculture, which had been previously operating along inefficient feudal lines.

As the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the United States hoped that Japan would become a strong capitalist ally in the region. To that end, in 1949, the banker and U.S. presidential advisor Joseph Dodge (1890–1964) helped Japan balance its budget, bring inflation under control, and remove widespread government subsidies that propped up inefficient practices. Dodge’s policies, now known as the Dodge Line, decreased the level of state intervention in the Japanese economy, making the latter much more dynamic. Shortly after those policies took effect, the Korean War (1950–1953) broke out, and the United States procured many of its war supplies from the geographically close Japan. Economic liberalization combined with the sudden increase in manufacturing demand supercharged Japan’s, and particularly Tokyo’s, recovery.

Tokyo began to experience mind-bogglingly fast economic growth. The city rapidly reindustrialized and acted as a major trade hub as the country’s imports and exports increased dramatically. The archipelago nation had relatively few natural resources, but by importing large amounts of raw materials to manufacture finished goods, Japan was able to achieve impressive economies of scale, multiply manufacturing output, and increase profits. Those profits were then reinvested into better equipment and technological research, boosting output and profits in a virtuous cycle.

Besides buying Japanese products outright, the United States government removed trade barriers on Japanese goods and, by and large, resisted calls to institute anti-Japanese protectionist measures, thus ensuring that Japanese entrepreneurs were free to sell their goods in the United States and elsewhere. In the post-Korean War period, banks in the United States and elsewhere invested heavily in Japan’s economy and expected large returns.

They were rewarded as Japan’s “economic miracle” materialized and Tokyo flourished. Between 1958 and 1960, Japanese exports to the United States increased by 150 percent. In 1968, less than twenty-two years after World War II, Japan boasted the world’s second-largest economy, and Tokyo was at the heart of the nation’s newfound prosperity.

Tokyo was soon the birthplace and home-base of major global companies, producing cars (Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, and Mitsubishi), cameras (Canon, Nikon, and Fujifilm), watches (Casio, Citizen, and Seiko), and other digital goods (Panasonic, Nintendo, Toshiba, Sony, and Yamaha).

Tokyo’s entrepreneurial success is partly due to innovation. Toyota, for example, edged out American car manufacturers by creating a new production system that used strategic automation and “just-in-time manufacturing,” thus increasing efficiency. “Just-in-time manufacturing,” where each step in the manufacturing process is timed to eliminate the need for excess inventory storage, has since become the global norm across a range of industries.

Since the 1970s, Tokyo has also become renowned for cutting-edge robotics. Developing expertise in industrial robotics was a natural extension of the city’s manufacturing prowess, but Tokyo companies and researchers have since branched out into many other areas of robotics. The city has created innovations ranging from robotic bellhops and airport greeters to friendly robotic baby seals that assist Alzheimer’s patients.

The largely destroyed capital city of a country devastated by war managed to transform itself into one of the world’s leading technology centers within a few decades. Thanks to the ingenuity and determination of the city’s people combined with conditions of peace, economic freedom, and the opportunity to engage in global trade, Tokyo became an “economic miracle” that qualifies it as one of modern history’s great urban success stories. And it is fitting that a city at the forefront of technological progress should be our thirtieth and final Center of Progress.

Blog Post | Violence

Mueller: The Stupidity of War

International war is not a requirement of history or of human nature, but merely an idea that has been grafted onto international society.

Summary: This article delves into the profound stupidity and devastating consequences of war. By analyzing historical data and empirical evidence, the article argues that the institution of international war has become obsolete, not because of any external or internal changes in human society, but because of a shift in attitudes and ideas. This transformation suggests that war is not an inherent necessity dictated by human nature or history, but rather a human invention imposed upon international society.


The idea that war is profoundly stupid has likely been evident pretty much forever. For example, it was certainly possible to note with dismay that one of the most famous wars in history or mythology—the one between Greece and Troy—was stupidly fought over an errant wife, lasted for ten brutal years, and ended in the violent annihilation of an entire city-state.

However, it took until recent decades for substantial numbers of people effectively to act on and abide by the idea. Europe, once the most warlike continent, took the lead on this. In the 75-year period since 1945, it has experienced (and, for the most part, enjoyed) the longest period free from substantial interstate war since the continent itself was invented as a concept some 2500 years ago.

Moreover, not only have developed countries, including the Cold War superpowers, managed to stay out of war with each other since 1945, but there have been remarkably few international wars of any sort during the period, particularly in the last few decades

Thus, reversing the course of several millennia, countries, for the most part, no longer really consider war among them to be a sensible method for resolving their disputes. However, they may well feel freer to engage in behavior that might once have been taken to be casus belli, such as tinkering in civil wars, seizing bits of territory, firing shots across bows, lobbing cyber balloons, exacting economic sanctions, or poaching fish.

Over the twentieth century, then, something that might be called a culture or society of international peace or a widespread aversion to war (or a sensitivity to its essential stupidity) has been established with regard to how countries relate to each other. And the chief consequence of this development has been the remarkable decline – or, in the case of the developed world, the almost utter absence – of the venerable institution over the last several decades.

This book is something of a biography of the rise of that idea. And I survey and critique the foreign policy history of the post-World War II era during which an aversion to international war, or an acceptance of the idea that it is fundamentally stupid, has grown.

In the process, I examine several additional and associated consequences of the rise of aversion to international war:

  • Nuclear deterrence was not necessary to preserve the peace during (and after) the Cold War. The Soviet Union, while embracing the idea of international revolution, never saw direct war as a device for carrying this out. That is, there was nothing to deter.
  • Prestige now comes not from prowess in armed conflict as in days of old, but from economic progress, maintaining a stable and productive society, and, for many, putting on a good Olympics, sending a rocket to or toward the moon, or managing a pandemic.
  • Under the circumstances, there is potential virtue in the traditionally maligned techniques of complacency and appeasement for dealing with international problems.
  • There is little justification for the continuing and popular tendency to inflate threats and dangers in the international arena – even to the point of deeming some of them to be “existential.” This holds for any challenges presented by China or Russia: neither seems to harbor Hitler-like dreams of extensive expansion by military means, and both are trading states that need a stable and essentially congenial international environment to flourish. And the consequences of nuclear proliferation have been substantially benign (except on agonies, obsessions, rhetoric, posturing, and spending), while alarmed efforts to prevent proliferation have proved to be very costly, leading to the deaths of more people than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
  • Although problems certainly remain, none of these are of a kind and substantial enough to require the United States (or pretty much anybody) to maintain a large standing military force for dealing with them.
  • The rather natural and substantially immutable establishment of something of a world order has scarcely required the active machinations of the United States. I argue that it was primarily the rise of an aversion to international war (not, for example, nuclear fears or American efforts at security provision) that has led to the remarkable, and expanding, condition of international peace that has arisen since 1945.

International war, then, seems to be in pronounced decline because of the way attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the ancient and once-formidable formal institution of slavery became discredited and then obsolete. And the process of change suggests that international war is not a requirement of history or of human nature, but merely an idea, an institution or invention that has been grafted onto international society.

Its replacement in much of the world by a culture or society of international peace has come about, it seems, without the intervention or service of cherubs, doves, and choirs of angels; without changing human nature; without creating an effective world government or system of international law; without modifying the nature of the state or the nation state; without fabricating an effective moral or practical equivalent; without enveloping the earth in democracy or prosperity; without devising ingenious agreements to restrict arms or the arms industry; without altering the international system; without improving the competence of political leaders; and without doing much of anything about nuclear weapons.

This is an excerpt adapted from the book The Stupidity of War

Blog Post | Economic Growth

It's Time to Rethink Foreign Aid Initiatives

Foreign aid hasn't helped Africa develop. Nor has it boosted democracy.

Last week on CapX I explained why the theoretical case for foreign aid is, at best, questionable, and why aid’s practical impact on some of the world’s poorest economies may well have been harmful. The case against aid doesn’t stop there. There are also problems with aid delivery and the negative impact of foreign aid on the spread of democracy. 

Official aid is disbursed in a plethora of ways. The European Union, for example, gives aid through the European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid. But individual EU member-states also have their own aid agencies. Europeans also have a strong voice on the governing boards of the World Bank and IMF, which also disburse aid. In addition to those official agencies, there has been a massive increase in the number of aid-promoting non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which also receive and disburse the money of Western taxpayers. 

The “aid industry” provides employment for many thousands of people. Consequently, a large percentage of the money spent on foreign aid goes to cover overhead costs, including administration, travel and accommodation. Michael Maren, a former aid worker, writes that the money spent on aid bureaucracies creates perverse incentives. “We have to take advantage of this famine to expand our regular program,” argued one aid official that Maren encountered in Africa. She saw hunger and poverty as “a growth opportunity”. “Whatever the original intentions,” Maren notes, “aid programs had become an end in themselves.” 

Dealing with swarms of donors and aid agencies, all of whom require some degree of attention, puts an enormous strain on African bureaucracies. The time and effort spent on dealing with the needs of foreign donors rather than concentrating on the population has further distanced African governments from their electorates. Working with aid organizations operating in Kenya, for example, became such a problem that the “government and donors… agreed on some principles of partnership that included a ‘quiet time’ between May 1 and June 30 each year.” 

Moreover, effective and efficient delivery of aid by a multitude of actors has proved to be an insurmountable challenge. Often, it has resulted in “duplication” of their efforts. Thus, “monitoring surveys indicate that limited progress has been made toward coordination goals by the United States or donors in general.” In Ethiopia, for instance, government officials spend “half to one-third of their time” participating in “coordination meetings” with a multitude of NGOs, international aid agencies and bilateral donors. 

Also, many foreign donors have their own agendas that may be detrimental to the welfare of the very people they are supposed to be there to help. Like the 19th-century European missionaries who went to Africa to spread their idea of a “good life”, modern day aid missionaries have found in Africa a fertile ground for social experiments that would never be accepted in their home countries. Tanzania, for example, is still recovering from an attempt to centrally plan the economy, the so-called “Ujaama” policy of collectivization that was bankrolled to the tune of $10 billion by socialist governments in Scandinavian countries in the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, some Western NGOs, like Oxfam, have urged African countries not to liberalise their trade regimes even though there is a general consensus among academics that free trade is an important source of economic growth and prosperity. 

Research also suggests that some aid ends up in the pockets of government bureaucrats instead of reaching the intended beneficiaries. During a 2012 panel on economic and social policy, then World Bank President Ban Ki-moon claimed that 30 per cent of development aid “failed to reach its final destination”. A leaked 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in Nairobi revealed that $1.3 million in aid for schools was “misappropriated” and another $17.3 million worth of textbooks purchased with aid dollars was “lost” by government officials.

Aid also encourages rent-seeking in recipient countries. Special interest groups and individuals focus their efforts not on being productive, but on lobbying government officials in order to get access to aid. In that way, aid reduces potential economic output and encourages corruption and political conflict. 

Moreover, by transferring resources to the favored projects of government officials, competition among domestic producers is undermined. As a result of government favoritism, parts of the domestic consumer base may become captive to firms that provide shoddy and expensive goods and services. 

Similarly, aid can undermine the international competitiveness of African exports by artificially strengthening the local currency. As researchers at the IMF found, “aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a [recipient] country’s competitiveness, as reflected in a decline in the share of labor intensive and tradable industries in the manufacturing sector. We… [found] evidence suggesting that these effects stem from the real exchange rate overvaluation caused by aid inflows.” 

Making these matters worse is the lack of accountability and feedback in the aid industry. Very few aid agencies and virtually no individuals are directly responsible for specific outcomes. Independent evaluations of the effectiveness of donor efforts to alleviate poverty or to arrest the spread of disease, for example, are very rare. Moreover, the donors often determine what they will supply without much regard for what is actually needed. This top-down approach has most spectacularly failed to alleviate poverty in Africa where government accountability is weak and institutional deficiencies extensive. 

But does aid, in spite of the many problems with its delivery, promote democracy? Many people, including former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, have argued that it does. Researchers from the World Bank, however, found no evidence that aid promoted democracy between 1975 and 2000. In fact, the aid agencies have repeatedly bankrolled some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. According to one study, “The world’s 25 most undemocratic government rulers (out of 199 countries the World Bank rated on democracy) got a sum of $9 billion in foreign aid in 2002. Similarly, the world’s 25 most-corrupt countries got $9.4 billion in foreign aid in 2002.” 

Other research goes further, suggesting that aid may hurt democratic development in developing countries. That may be the case for several reasons. Aid helps to undermine democratic accountability in Africa, because African governments find themselves increasingly answerable to the donors, not to the public. Government spending proposals, for example, allocate funds in accordance with the advice of foreign experts rather than the wishes of the electorate. 

Aid encourages military spending. Since aid is fungible, it helps some recipient governments free up resources for military purchases that would otherwise be spent on roads and education, for example. Consider the World Bank’s recent contribution of $180 million toward the building of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline. Fearing that the oil revenue would be misspent, the World Bank got the Chadian government to commit to spending it on education, health, and infrastructure. What was the result? “The first $4.5 million received as a signing bonus from the oil companies was used to buy weapons—and it is estimated that as much as $12 million may be diverted to buy arms.”

In fact, Professor Paul Collier of Oxford University found that “something around 40 per cent of Africa’s military spending is inadvertently financed by aid.” Aid may also fuel armed competition for resources. There is some evidence, for example, that Somalia’s civil war was prolonged by the competition between different factions for the large amounts of food aid that the country was receiving. 

A growing number of Africans question the effects of foreign aid on economic growth and democracy in Africa. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, for example, has urged Africans “to be honest about the consequences of aid dependence,” for “what really matters most for socio-economic transformation is private capital.” He has called on African governments to create policy environments in which entrepreneurs can flourish. Others, like Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, have pointed to the negative political impact of aid. According to Mwenda, “foreign aid… is providing the government with an independent source of ‘unearned’ revenue. That allows the government to avoid accountability to Uganda’s citizens.” Unfortunately, when Mwenda spoke out against further aid at the 2007 TED Conference, the enraged Irish musician Bono heckled Mwenda with shouts of “Bollocks!” and “That’s bullshit.” 

Not only has aid failed to deliver growth in Africa. It hasn’t helped democracy either. Western donors, including the United Kingdom, should re-evaluate their commitment to further disbursements of aid to the continent.

This first appeared on CapX.