An American Lesson: The Power of Self-Reliant Thinking

Takahide Sakurai Chairmen of Committee on Economic Policy and Committee on the Fiscal System, Keidanren Chairman, The Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Company

This September I visited Las Vegas and the San Francisco Bay area. One of my purposes was to see for myself how cities and regions within the vast United States have managed to invigorate themselves. Las Vegas has developed into a substantial city with a population of 1.4 million, comparable to Kobe or Kyoto in Japan. And it is a big center of consumption, hosting upward of 34 million visitors a year. Meanwhile, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, similar in size to Tokyo Bay, lies Silicon Valley, which is now home to a tremendous collection of human talent and to about a quarter of America's entrepreneurial startups.

At the start of the twentieth century, Las Vegas was just a small oasis in the desert. But it started to change with the construction of the Hoover Dam, a big project undertaken as part of the government's effort to pull the country out of the Great Depression, along with the bold decision of the State of Nevada to legalize casino gambling. What we must also remember, though, is that the city's present prosperity is the result of the intense competition among hotel owners vying to attract guests with a combination of smart ideas and hard work. In Las Vegas we thus see a case in which a public works project, a major deregulatory move, and increased consumer spending resulted, some decades later, in a dramatic success story.

Silicon Valley similarly had little going for it. It had no industry to speak of, other than agriculture and a military communications research facility. The keys to its development were the success of Stanford University in luring talent from East Coast schools and the creation by the State of California of a favorable tax and legal environment for entrepreneurs.

Common to the two places is that their success was the product not just of physical construction but also of the self-reliant thinking of local governments and citizens, which produced tremendous added value. These cases offer splendid illustrations of the "knowledge-value revolution" expounded by Taichi Sakaiya.

Here in Japan, much attention is currently focused on the need to develop attractive cities amidst the drive to achieve structural reform. But for decades the national government has sought to develop the whole country evenly, and it has placed excessive emphasis on the construction of uniform physical infrastructure as the way to boost regional economies. Local governments and citizens have come to look to Tokyo for both money and ideas; they have not developed the habit of competitive thinking.

Value is created and productivity is enhanced when people think and work competitively and on their own initiative. We now hear calls for cutting the huge budget deficit and slashing the program of public works so as to minimize the amount of public debt left for our progeny to pay. But whether we make this debt an unbearable burden or an unexpected fortune for future generations depends on the efforts of each and every one of us now. All of us-the national government, local governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens-should vie with each other, putting our wisdom and enthusiasm to work in a wholehearted drive to make better use of our national resources, physical, financial, and human.