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Showing posts with label Saburo Okita. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saburo Okita. Show all posts

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Brian Easton: What Is The Purpose Of An Economy?


In his Economists in the Cold War, Alan Bollard contrasts Saburo Okita of Japan with Zhou En Lai of China to highlight a critical issue.

Saburo Okita (1914-1993) was in Manchuria (northeast China), in the port city of Darien (Chinese: Dalien) which was occupied by Japan at that time. Because they were politically unsympathetic to the increasingly militaristic occupation regime, his family moved in his teenage years back to Tokyo, where he graduated in electrical engineering and joined the civil service. During the Second World War, and despite reservations about Japan’s war policy, he was involved in managing the supplies of raw material such as coal and iron necessary for the war economy and food.