We have heard the lawyers-versus-engineers argument before. Forty years ago, Japan’s economic rise induced similar anxieties, most famously articulated in US sociologist Ezra Vogel’s book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America.
Commentators fretted that the US was mired in lawsuits while Japan’s best minds were solving problems and driving their country’s meteoric growth. Yet over the ensuing decades, the US, with its mammoth legal industry, outperformed Japan by a wide margin.
