Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead

A Washington business consultant and former government trade negotiator, Prestowitz here analyzes economic and cultural differences underlying our trade deficit with Japan and the U.S. decline in international markets. He also examines efforts to resolve our free-trade dilemma. Japan is a close-knit, exclusionary society, notes Prestowitz, with no room for U.S.-style individualism and little understanding of ""fair'' competition. Highly personalized Japanese companies with lifetime-employment policies cooperate as cross-shareowning groups to common advantage. By contrast, argues the author, when rival giants IBM and AT & T cautiously held back, independent young physicists and engineers``the small and the swift''created a spectacular global electronic industry, which Japan's government and industry, acting in concert, proceeded to preempt through investment, imitation and intense product development. Near-dominance in the American market ensued. What to do? Whatever the answer, readers of this book will understand far better the question. (April)