[japan@ihj] Built to Break: The World Industrial System in the New Era of Monopoly: Lessons from the Tohoku Earthquake

  • Lecturer: Barry C. Lynn, Director, New America Foundation
  • Moderator: Okazaki Tetsuji, Professor, The University of Tokyo
  • Date: Friday, July 20, 2012, 7:00 pm-
  • Venue: Lecture Hall, International House of Japan
  • Language: English (without Japanese interpretation)
  • Admission: Free (reservations required)

In recent years, we have witnessed a new phenomenon—the industrial crash—in which entire industrial systems can collapse due to a cascading domino effect. Such crashes can be triggered by financial shocks, like the Panic of September 2008. And they can be triggered by natural or political disasters, like the Tohoku earthquake of 2011. Worst of all, industrial crashes can make a isolated disaster much bigger, by swiftly transmitting and amplifying the original shock. Barry C. Lynn has studied industrial crashes since the first major such event, after an earthquake in Taiwan in 1999. This includes more than two months of research in Japan, mainly following the Niigata earthquake of 2007. Mr. Lynn will discuss the causes and potential effects of such crashes. And he will detail some of the ways that governments can greatly reduce the dangers posed by such crashes.

Barry Lynn

Barry Lynn is director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (Doubleday, 2005) and Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2010). Prior to taking his current position, Mr. Lynn was executive editor of Global Business Magazine for seven years, and worked as a correspondent in Peru, Venezuela, and the Caribbean for Associated Press and Agence France Presse.