Introduction

The living space in the house I bought in Oxford, England in 1984 is roughly one-third the living space in the house I bought in Lawrenceville, New Jersey in 1980, when I was teaching at Princeton University. I paid about the same amount for each of these houses, in terms both of dollars and income multiples, and although I do not know for certain, I suspect that each is worth about the same, substantially higher, amount today. A housing dollar buys a lot of space in the United States, so much so that comparisons with virtually any other advanced industrial country are bound to make the latter look inferior. Comparisons between the United States and Japan certainly yield this result. In this book, I intend to treat the United States as the exceptional case that it is and to base any comparisons I make on Britain and the rest of Western Europe. I also intend to consider Japan as a whole, rather than concentrating – as so much recent journalism and not a little scholarship have done – on Tokyo.