Dean Baker goes after people who claim that Japan has suffered terribly from its debt burden, arguing that Japan has actually done pretty well. But he's wrong: Japan has done better than he says 1/ braveneweurope.com/dean-baker-the…
Dean looks at GDP per capita. But Japan's aging population means that you really want to look at GDP per working-age adult. And by that measure Japan's growth has been essentially the same as America's 2/ 
The Japanese have also avoided mass unemployment, and they're doing a much better job than we are of not dying 3/
The truth is that these days Japan looks less like a cautionary tale than like a role model. Its performance only looks bad if you assume that the debt is a terrible problem, when all the evidence says that it isn't 4/
