Killer Rice

 In How Killer Rice Crippled Tokyo and the Japanese Navy Anne Webank explains how a diet of white rice in Japan led to a vitamin deficiency that caused a disease called kakke (beriberi) and how one doctor found a cure.

Japan, housing crisis and deflation

NPR's Planet Money podcast has an episode on Japan's long term economic slump. The transcript can be found at: Japan had a vibrant economy. Then it fell into a slump for 30 years. The episode puts much of the blame down to the bursting of bubbles in stocks and real estates. People lost a lot of money or wealth, and so they stopped spending and Japan went into a recession. This then led to a banking crisis and sustained deflation.

The ABC's If You're Listening also has an episode on Japan:  How Japan opted out of a global housing crisis. This episode discusses the measures the Japanese government took to lower house prices after they became unavoidable.

I think the two are linked and there are potential lessons for other countries:

• Don't let your real estate prices get too high, keep them affordable. Focus especially on making it easy to increase urban density and reduce red tape around urban development.
  
• If prices do start getting too high, try to bring them under control. But, whatever you do, don't let them come down too much. You really need to avoid sustained deflation.
   

 

Maybe Japan's ageing population isn't such a problem after all

Fred Pearce writes that Japan's ageing population could actually be good news.