He is best known for his analyses since the mid-1980s of the Japanese business, financial, and manufacturing system, and he has applied lessons from Japan's experience to US, European, and other policy questions. As deputy editor of the international banking magazine Euromoney in the late 1980s, he questioned the sustainability of Japan's super-high land and stock values.[2] He was one of the earliest critics of financialization, arguing that there is no substitute for advanced manufacturing industries (highly capital-intensive, know-how-intensive industries typically making capital equipment, new materials, and leading edge components) as the main pillar of an advanced economy.[3] He suggests that the United States made a catastrophic mistake in the 1990s in allowing leadership in such industries to pass to Japan. This was a major theme of his 1995 book Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000. It was named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 1995 by BusinessWeek.[4] In 2012, he wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday Review called "The Myth of Japan's Failure" [5] which updated his view that Japan has continued to best the United States all through the “lost decade".
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