[第６回]時代を先取りした男
高橋是清が世界に残した教訓 リチャード・スメサースト Rechard Smethurst ピッツバーグ大教授

Korekiyo Takahashi: Man ahead of his times

Korekiyo Takahashi is known in Japan, and to students of monetary and fiscal policy in the West, as the person who applied what later came to be called Keynesian countercyclical policies to lift Japan from the Great Depression.

He accomplished this by 1935-1936, half a decade before the United States and most of Europe had recovered. In fact, Takahashi's "brilliant and highly successful fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies" worked so well that the Harvard Business School in 1981 published a case study titled, "The Takahashi Strategy." Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, stated in 2003 that "Korekiyo Takahashi brilliantly rescued Japan from the Great Depression through reflationary policies in the early 1930s."

By devaluing the yen vis-a-vis the dollar, by increasing the amount of money in circulation, by lowering interest rates, and by large-scale deficit financing, Takahashi's policies led to an increase in real gross national product of 32 percent in the four years after he returned to the finance portfolio in December 1931--following two years of stagnation under Junnosuke Inoue's tight money regime in 1929-1931.

In the same period, the real GNP of the United States declined by 4 percent. Today, the world faces its greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. Takahashi's lesson for the Japanese government, and the Republican free-market ideologues in the United States who are resisting President Barack Obama's stimulus package, is that if reflation worked so well in the 1930s, there is no reason it won't work again in the early 21st century.

But Takahashi's economic and political philosophy has more to teach us than only the use of Keynesian countercyclical policies during a severe downturn. From early in his career, Takahashi proposed economic growth that raised people's living standards and did not make only the state and the economic elite rich. As early as 1885, Takahashi used the phrase "rich country, prosperous people" in place of the Meiji Era (1868-1912) mantra, "rich country, strong army."

In the decades between the two world wars, he advocated an "economics of growth" policy in which democratically elected political parties, central and local governments, large and small businesses, and workers and their labor unions cooperated to raise productivity and general prosperity.

Although Takahashi believed that government had a role in stimulating this prosperity, he also believed in the efficacy of free markets. He opposed top-down industrial planning because he thought regional officials and entrepreneurs understood local conditions better than central bureaucrats. Takahashi believed that the key to economic growth was inexpensive capital, meaning that government should supply much of the money, but local people should decide how best to use it.

Takahashi was committed to governmental decentralization.
As Japan after the Meiji Restoration moved toward greater centralization--of government, of language and of educational policy--Takahashi advocated the election of prefectural governors, and turning over the land tax and control of education, public works and public health to local communities.

Takahashi advocated the use of a graduated income tax, that is, higher taxes for the rich and lower for the poor, to narrow the income gap between rich and poor. His rationale was that the poor spent a higher proportion of their income, and their consumption could spur the "economics of growth." More income meant more consumption, which meant more demand, which meant more production, which meant more income, demand and consumption all over again.

Takahashi believed that civilians should control the military and that foreign policy should lead and national defense follow. While defense was necessary, excessive spending on the army and the navy was dangerous because it endangered Japan's fiscal integrity, because it was "nonproductive," that is, it did not have the same multiplier effect as civil spending, and because military men might decide to use their expensive toys to begin wars.

Takahashi repeatedly stated that Japan, even in its China policy, should operate within the framework of the Anglo-American world order. The two English-speaking powers had far greater industrial capacity, and, therefore, far greater potential military power than Japan. They also provided Japan with capital, technology, raw materials and markets that it needed not only for its economic prosperity, but also to maintain its military power.

Japan would not only lose if it went to war with Britain and the United States, but it would make itself militarily weaker in the process. Takahashi consistently resisted the military's demands for more money in the interwar years, a resistance that cost him his life at the hands of army extremists on Feb. 26, 1936.

And finally, Takahashi, although committed to using fiscal and monetary policy to spur economic growth, understood that there were times to balance the budget and raise interest rates in order to contract the economy. His efforts to balance the budget in 1935 led directly to his murder a few months later.

Takahashi's obvious lesson for Japan, and one might add for America and elsewhere, is the Keynesian one--to use fiscal and monetary stimulus to help bring economic recovery from the current recession. But there are three other lessons as well.

First, Takahashi's longstanding ambivalence toward the military has meaning for postwar Japan. Takahashi in 1946-7 would have been a supporter of Article 9 of the postwar Constitution. He was close personally and in his point of view to Kijuro Shidehara, who was a strong proponent of Article 9, even though he served as foreign minister in Cabinets formed by the political party in opposition to Takahashi's.

Second, Takahashi's efforts to decentralize power, and particularly to give local governments control over the content of school curricula, would lead him to oppose efforts by the central government to control textbooks from Tokyo.

Finally, Takahashi was a pragmatist. He believed that policy should be based on existing conditions, not academic theory. He would reject the hegemony in the past two decades of the free-market ideology.

While Takahashi understood the efficacy of markets in distributing economic information, he also knew that there were times for government to step in and regulate markets, to follow, like Keynes, "the middle way."

Japan, and for that matter the world, needs leaders with his pragmatic intuition, his opposition to dogma, his sound judgment and his willingness to make difficult and controversial decisions, and then to have the courage to implement them.

The author is a professor of Japanese history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of many articles and books on modern Japanese, economic, political and social history. His most recent book is "From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan's Keynes" (Harvard 2007).