>Is Japan doing as well?  Well, no.
The real Japan issue is that a lot of its slow growth has to do with demography. According to OECD numbers, in 1990 there were 86 million Japanese between the ages of 15 and 64; by 2007, that was down to 83 million. Meanwhile, the US working-age population rose from 164 million to 202 million.
What do you find if you look not at GDP per capita, but GDP per working-age resident?
What you see is that 1990-2000 really was a lost decade: Japanese output per potential worker fell a lot relative to the United States, when in the past it had been steadily rising. However, Japan made up most though not all of the lost ground after 2000.
I think you can make the case that Japan should have been doing better in 2007. And even if you think that 2007 was where it “should” be, it spent a long time operating below potential. … the data don’t match the picture of relentless decline that is so widely held.
And Japan did go through all this period without anything like the suffering, the human disaster, that America is experiencing.
I’ve been saying for a while that when people ask whether we might respond to our crisis as badly as Japan did, they’re way behind the curve. We are, in fact, doing worse than Japan ever did.