This is nonsense. According to the World Bank at http://data.worldbank.org, the total cumulative GDP growth of Japan between 1991 and 2009 was 18.15% while it was 59.47% for the United States. Even though measuring economic development with GDP growth has its problems, the difference is so enormous that it cannot be denied that the US economy did a lot better, even with all the recent developments.

Those numbers are somewhat arbitrary move it back 6 years and Japan grew faster from 1985 to now. The real story is Japan's growth from 1960 - 1995 was ridiculous. To the point where it's still grown more from 1960 to now than the US did. They had a significant collapse in 1995 which they are still recovering from.

Germany had no collapse in the nineties (although it had to deal with the reunification), still the same number for Germany is 29%, still very far from the US.

The same numbers for the 1984-2009 period are: Japan 61.7%, Germany 59.7%, United States 108.8%. A very large difference.

We are not looking at the same numbers (Not inflation adjusted but relative growth should work out).

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...

  JP 1.347T (1985) > 4.991T (2008)  = 3.7x
  USA 4.188T (1985) > 14.591T (2008) = 3.48x

I think you could prove almost anything depending on the time period you take. Basically, since 1995, Japanese gdp has been very slow growing. In 2009, the GDP has decreased of 5 %, which is far worse than any other rich country of a significant size AFAIK in the last few years.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk... (beware that 2009 is missing, I guess the definite numbers may not be there yet).

I think it is fair to say that Japanese economy is in a really bad shape, although the explanation is not as simplistic as the one given by techrunch, obviously. Paul Krugman has a few papers on this which are well know, although maybe not up to date anymore (http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/japtrap.html).

Not sure why the numbers are so different. I simply took the product of the yearly GDP growth rates, as reported by the World Bank.

My sources: http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/countries/en/g...

http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/countries/en/j...

http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/countries/en/u...