Dear all,
I'm a new member here, after reading Mises.org for about 2 months now. I'm an engineer, moved out of academia and government into private industry a year ago after formulating roughly my disagreements with previous institutions. Economically, the Austrian school, and how it ascribes detrimental effects on the economy to the effects of government intervention (and I am now very familiar from experience with the people who inhabit positions in government, and academia, if you pardon the latter!), pretty well makes sense to me.
After attending a, to me shocking, presentation by Dr. Richard Jerram of Macquarrie and Associates in Tokyo a few weeks ago, where he advocated the apparently still respectable Keynesian remedies as solutions to the Japanese financial situation, to the point of saying outright that the government "has to steal the savings of the old people" and then going about explaining the best ways to accomplish this, and other ways in which to make saving less attrative so as to get the money circulating---well, I thought that was bad enough, but the fact that the audience went along with this was even more amazing and disconcerting---I decided I wanted to introduce some of my friends and business associates, not to mention my Japanese wife, to these important concepts, so as to allow us to make our practical decisions based on common intellectual ground.
Now, I haven't read any of the standard works on Austrian economics yet, only getting through the fascinating blog articles and comments on this site is taking up a lot of time (two months so far, and far from done), but I wondered whether there are any Japanese representatives of the Austrian school, or at least influenced thereby---I used to teach English to a very interesting professor of the history of economics at Kyoto University during my post-doc there, and he was fundamentally against government intervention, mostly for political reasons (historically important in Japan)---and similarly, whether any of the major literature had been translated (well) into the Japanese language (some readable books, like Dawkins' "The God Delusion" are translated, to be sure, but very very hard for common people to read in the translation, for reasons of style).
It is actually quite hard to find the works in English also, at major bookstores, so browsing is not really an option---the fact that the Mises store sells these directly is a boon to those of us that already value them for their concepts!
Any help and advice much appreciated.
Gernot Hassenpflug, Tokyo, Japan
This could prove helpful!
Human Action in Japan!
Today, Japan celebrates the publication of a new edition of Human Action in Japanese, with many improvements and beautiful packaging. The image below is the facilitator (Hiroshi Yoshdia) with a Mises tie, and the publisher with a Mises cap!
Welcome to the forums by the way!
Thank you, thank you, that is great news! While I have my doubts that most "common people" will want to start from scratch with Human Action, I am very pleased to see this. Great tip! I'll try to follow this up, as not even the bookstores could help me finding copies in English, nor did they know of Japanese versions of the books I was asking for (true, I did not ask for Human Action, but rather Man, Economy, and State, among others).
I'm sure I'll enjoy my time here, it is well-spent and extremely educational to me.