Give the man time! A new head of government cannot do everything at once! He has only had three months. These are the responses that one is likely to get when expressing doubts about the effectiveness of Obama’s policies when measured against the high expectations and overwhelming feelings of urgency that something dramatic should be done. Impatience is frequently interpreted as following from insufficient understanding about the set of circumstances that this new president inherited, circumstances that could hardly be worse in the imagination of most sympathisers. What Obama has been expected to do comes down to a task for which daunting is too weak an adjective, one requiring herculean powers. And of course that takes time. All true. But by not being critical, by not scrutinising his early decisions about the people with whom he wants to work, by not strongly questioning how these people interpret the jobs they have been asked to do; by not being critical of Obama in his early days, we may unwittingly be adding to the many disadvantages that surround him. When in political life something very big must be undertaken, the question of competence on the part of those who undertake it gains...

“When it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed [to] looking at what we got wrong in the past”, so said president elect Barack Obama when commenting on possible investigations of wrongdoing by the CIA and other American government agencies. I read this in the train to Tokyo (having just arrived from Shanghai) in the Daily Yomiuri. That paper, despite erratic editorial ups-and-downs, has probably been the best instant English language guide to Japanese editorial preoccupations and simultaneously carries most of the editorial pages of the Washington Post, thus serving as a pretty good substitute browser when the internet is not within reach. Taken out of context, one cannot on the basis of that one phrase be sure what Obama actually thinks. But what jumps from the page right at me, as the empty rice paddies and stands of bamboo pass by under that unsurpassed cobalt blue sky (a well-kept secret: the Tokyo area is the place to be in January) is David Ignatius’s praise of Obama’s remark as a display of realism, of a kind that “will disappoint liberal score-settlers”. This is a new category for me....

The prevailing intellectual climate is not friendly to the notion that much of the time we do not know what we are doing, in the sense of producing results that diverge widely from what in all sanity we would have wanted to produce. Intellectually we have come a far way from remote ancestors who thought they could make sense of their reality by invoking “fate” or capricious gods who derived pleasure from playing with humanity. Enlightened thought has us acting as conscious agents. All varieties of liberalism – not the “leftism” of American political understanding, but the legacy of Locke, Hume, and John Stuart Mill – hold high the concepts of “agency” and “choice”. Especially in the United States these are taken for granted. American social science is steeped in them. Political thought on the most popular level treats them as given. The way in which our society is put together and how it works is the outcome of collective choice, our lives are lived as directed by conscious human agency; the one assumption contains, of course, the other. The currently influential school in political thought known as “rational choice theory” is an obnoxiously extreme example of this intellectual disposition....

There could hardly be a greater difference between the United States and Japan than when their heads of government change. The American president decapitates, as it were, the government entities staffed by career officials and brings in a double layer of new appointees who, he hopes, will do his bidding. The new Japanese prime minister must be painstakingly heedful of balancing factional interests of the ruling party as he selects members of a cabinet, and those newly chosen top politicians are subsequently treated as temporary visitors in the ministries they ostensibly head. If these Japanese politicians are lucky, and survive more than one of the regular cabinet reshuffles, the top bureaucrats who work theoretically underneath them may perhaps help realize a small pet project that will be associated with their name. In the context of the ubiquitous thorny question of how much politicians should listen to bureaucrats or bureaucrats should be guided by elected representatives, the balance between the two has in both countries swung to extreme and opposite ends. But Japan and the United States have still something in common. Something that has suddenly become highly relevant in the United States. Among American government entities, there are a couple...

Notwithstanding the gradually declining fortunes of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan as a journalists’ club (you cannot count on finding a real-life correspondent when you enter its main bar), it still manages to pull off memorable events at which journalists are given the opportunity to engage prominent figures in serious and searching conversation. I participated in one yesterday, at which two recipients of the Japan Prize, David Kuhl & Dennis Meadows, could discuss what they had been doing and thinking. For the radiology pioneer and “father of positron emission tomography scanning” – allowing doctors to look into the physical substance of our brains and other soft tissue – the press could hardly have been expected to express more than awe, but the exchange with Dr. Meadows turned into a probing discussion. Having become famous 37 years ago with his Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth, Meadows has continued to think about what economies are for and what they cannot do. If the format of the event and time had permitted it, this FCCJ press luncheon could easily have turned into a brainstorming session about the broader background against which the current financial crisis could profitably be viewed,...

and a related new column by Jan Sampiemon Outsize controversies attending two much awaited top political meetings held this week – the G20 and NATO – should awaken the world to the fact that the various crises confronting us can also be seen as being linked to a huge conceptual crisis. Being discussed are the two areas of activity that will probably more than anything else decide the medium-term future of the world: the collapse of part of the global financial system and American foreign policy. The latter has been made almost invisible in the news by the former, but continues to be a weighty factor. The shallowness of the talk reaching us from these meetings should worry us. Lack of political will is of course one reason for it, but another one, directly related to that, is the huge conceptual crisis. Conceptual crises may follow from intellectual sloppiness, a dearth of imagination and other symptoms of idle brains. But I think more important in this case is a loss of knowledge that cripples otherwise very active brains. The loss of knowledge in the past few decades has been horrendous. A loss caused partly through illusions created by the forceful...