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gwern comments on Assessing Kurzweil: the results - Less Wrong
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Whether you will be hacked and your trade secrets leaked to a competitor is not irrelevant. Whether you'll be forced to bribe officials to do business is not irrelevant. Whether you can count on them to stay bribed and not be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether you have to worry, ala Rio Tinto, that your executives will be imprisoned is not irrelevant. Whether the succession of power will be smooth and not descend into coups or other infighting is not irrelevant. Politics matters; a company might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in the company.
And if you look at the growth rate, you see that not only was the growth rate leading to exponential growth (4% a year compounding), the growth rate itself grew to 7.15%, after which it fell a percentage point or two a year until in 1998 it was actually negative 2%, whereupon it hovers around 0% with occasional small periods of growth counterbalanced by disasters like negative 5.5% in 2009 ('may have started to grow again'?).
A flat real GDP contradicts your previous claims that a stable economy should then grow at the rate of technological improvements; or has there been no such improvements since 1989?
It's also misleading since it's not real GDP PPP. If you look at a graph of real GDP like http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/JPNRGDPR or real GDP PPP http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/JPNRGDPC , you see the abrupt break at 1989; if the '80s trend had continued, the real GDP would be off the chart.
Refused? I already answered: it looks like the middle-income trap which has affected many countries. The country just stops growing significantly, or actually declines in real terms, due to any of the potential problems already listed.
China is known to have a fairly predictable patterns for bribery. Predictable bribey becomes de facto just another tax. Of course there can be occasional exceptions.
The last one was the Chinese Revolution in 1949.
Derivatives magnify noise. Compute a 5 years average.
Japan current GDP, both nominal and PPP, are higher today than in 1989.
The middle-income trap that didn't happen in Japan, or South Korea, or many other countries.
Handwaving away just one of the examples.
Yes, minus some minor events like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Russia & China nearly going to nuclear war in 1969, Tienanmen Square... Gosh, there's no reason to think that China is at the slightest risk of war or revolution; it'd be like worrying about nuclear warfare when the last nuclear bomb used in a war was back in 1946!
Better yet, let's look at 1989-2011 using the FRED data on real GDP. Over 23 years, the economy increased in size by 26%, for an annualized growth rate of ~1%. This in a time period which saw, among other things, the Internet revolution start and reach maturity. Did technology really improve only by 1% Is this really consistent with your claim that Japan hit the limits of what is possible?
Use real figures. Inflation has not been 0% the entire period, and your chosen graphs aren't even being reported in yen.
'Many'? Look at a ranking of real PPP, there's a great many countries well below South Korea. Above SK, it's basically oil countries, European/American countries, and tiny outliers like Singapore.