Daily Inspiration Quote by Toshihiko Fukui

A central banker’s sentence that reads like a footnote is still a political act. Fukui’s invocation of “new endogenous growth theory” is doing quiet work: it smuggles a normative agenda into the cool language of macroeconomics. By anchoring productivity in what nations can deliberately build - “human capital and research and development” - he nudges the listener away from fatalism (growth as luck, demographics, or global winds) toward governance (growth as policy choice). “TFP,” the famously residual category in growth accounting, is recast from mystery-meat to management target.

The specific intent is technocratic persuasion. Fukui isn’t selling a single program so much as an ordering principle: if Japan wants higher living standards, it should treat schools, labs, and know-how as capital stock, not soft social spending. That matters in a context where budgets get moralized - pensions and public works framed as “real,” education and R&D as optional. Calling them “intangible capitals” is a rhetorical upgrade: it grants the prestige of investment to things politicians otherwise cut first.

The subtext is also defensive. Japan’s long stagnation made “productivity” a catch-all demand, often used to justify deregulation or labor discipline. Fukui steers the conversation toward capability-building rather than punishment. Growth, in this framing, isn’t squeezed from workers; it’s cultivated through skills, innovation systems, and institutions that make ideas scalable. The blandness is strategic: it offers a consensus vocabulary where ideology would spark a fight.