The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan

Conclusion

172 Conclusion Economic Knowledge and the Naturalization of the Growth Ideal In the 1961 series of Asahi newspaper essays quoted in the introductin to this study, the well-known economic writer Ryü Shintarö wondered aloud at the sudden ubiquity of the word “growth” (seichö) on the public stage. His observation was a reflection of the novelty of the national preoccupation with rapid macroeconomic growth. Although it arose out of longer streams of economic thought and practice stretching back as far as the eighteenth century, growth as the prescriptive ideal and abiding obsession of modern societies was a distinguishing hallmark of the years following the end of World War II. Indeed, the very word “growth,” as Ryü and others pointed out, seemed new.1 The concept of growth, borrowed from the biological sciences, had operated in political-economic thought from its classical period. Yet it was the words “progress” and “advancement” that had more often than not been used during earlier times to convey the idea of an increase in material wealth. In Japan, too, seichö appeared only infrequently in public writings on the economy before the end of World War II. The expansion or strengthening of economic output had instead been described by a variety of words like kögyö (promotion of industry), hatten (development), kakuchö (increase), and kakudai (expansion). Yet by the turn of the 1960s, as Ryü tells us, the term keizai seichö (economic growth) had become the dominant description of material increase and positive economic performance. This transformation in the language of the economy represented more than a rhetorical replacement of one word for others. It was in part by these shifting terms and what Ryü called metaphors that the economy was framed, understood, and managed. The newer term seichö was bound up with a set of technical and ideological developments that provided the conditions under which “growth” could be naturalized as the overriding definition of national purpose. The very real power of the concept of growth to set the Conclusion 173 parameters of national and social expectation depended on the exquisite coupling of a new, highly successful numerical scientism within economics and an inherent optimism at the heart of a future-oriented heuristics of social change and possibility, one attractively packaged for national publics . Researchers and policy makers pitched the potentially dry statistical claims and prognostications of postwar economic analysis in terms of compelling national quests for progress and accomplishment. At the same time, they leveraged these new forms of macroeconomic knowledge to support enticing visions of personal prosperity for individual citizens. The successful wedding of such technocratic analysis to nationalist image making in Japan and elsewhere secured the place of growthism as one of the defining ideologies of the second half of the twentieth century. Growth in Japan thus had attained a new valence during the 1950s that went beyond the less rigorously defined and often more sectorally delimited conceptions of material increase of earlier eras. Because it became the object of intense theoretical and empirical scrutiny within the ascendant discipline of economics at the same time that it was cast in political terms as the path to a better future, “growth” came to bear a heavy burden of meaning . By 1960, it represented an encompassing vision of national purpose and peacetime redemption. This study has examined the history of growth in terms of its postwar deployment as a policy solution to what were commonly perceived as the ills of Japanese capitalism and also its technical foundations within social science. The far-reaching changes in economic knowledge in the mid-twentieth century—the simultaneous moves toward arithmetical measurement and new theoretical concerns with aggregative macroeconomic abstractions —acted as an “enabling technical revolution” to the rise of growthist ways of seeing the national economy. In truth, however, there was no single revolution in economic thought, but the opening up of a series of interrelated research agendas that helped to remap the discipline of economics and position the question of total economic output at the center of public concern around the world as perhaps never before. Without these developments in the modes and objects of economic knowledge, the specifically growthist forms of the economism of the postwar period could not have taken the shape that they did. The influence of these developments was by no means confined to a field of economics the boundaries of which were coterminus with those of academia; it also reshaped conceptions at the center of the economic apparatus of the state. Much...