Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi wants to spend 370 trillion yen. The government’s own numbers say she doesn’t have enough people to spend it well.
That’s not a footnote. That’s the story.
Takaichi’s cabinet has approved a long-term blueprint for public-private investment across seventeen strategic sectors — AI, semiconductors, quantum technology, defense, biotech, shipbuilding. The claim is that this level of government-directed capital will double Japan’s real gross domestic product growth rate, from zero point seven percent a year over the last decade to one point four percent through 2040. The pitch even includes knock-on economic benefits running up to twenty times the investment itself.
Meanwhile, that same policy apparatus projects a shortfall of 6.4 million workers by 2030. Not by 2040, when the growth plan is supposed to have paid off. By 2030 — while these seventeen sectors are still standing up their supply chains, training their engineers, and competing for the same shrinking labor pool as everyone else in the economy.
Most of the coverage treats this as two separate stories: an ambitious growth plan, and a demographic headwind Japan has been managing for years. I’d argue they’re the same story, and the government is only telling half of it…
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