Japanese memory chips fall where they may. (Scan).(Brief Article)

In the early 1990s, an active group of magazine writers, left-wing sociologists, Washington string-pullers, nutty professors, and Santa Monica socialists--people like James Fallows, Eamonn Fingleton, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Lewis, Robert Kuttner, John Judis, Pat Choate, Derek Shearer, Ezra Vogel, Karel van Wolferen, John Zysman, and Clyde Prestowitz--aggressively promoted the idea that Japanese businesses were going to eat the lunch of their American counterparts. They declared this was because the Japanese were wise enough to let all-seeing government regulators steer and subsidize their industries, while Americans practiced crude free-market capitalism. (The whole point of their argument was to encourage increased government control of the U.S. private sector.)

In the decade since these unfortunate sages issued their maxims, the Japanese economy has collapsed as a result of accumulated government meddling. Figures recently showed, for instance, that over the last five years the Japanese market share in computer memory chips tumbled ...