It is actually a tragedy that Japanese society took the Bismarckian path of state welfare.

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Whether we like it or not, we are going back to the pre-Bismarckian world, where work had no formal stopping point.

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But I cannot, in closing, resist a comment: Was it really inevitable that Japan, as well as the U.S. and so many other countries, adopted the Bismarckian model of national pension schemes?

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