It's plausible, after all, that industrial policy helped mobilize resources by encouraging a "common cause" mentality among citizens and by ensuring that the benefits of growth were distributed equally, relatively speaking. It's also plausible that market-friendly policies helped mobilize resources by pushing Asian companies to compete in the world market, where only high levels of worker education and participation would allow them to succeed.

The overwhelming mystery of East Asia is the region's enormously high savings rate, which in Korea is over 40 percent even now. Even mainland China has an astronomical savings rate, which suggests that the region's propensity for saving does not have to do with the free market per se.