I mean, the simple answer is that people in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are all poorer than the US and EU. Japan had decades to catch up and failed to do so. The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.

Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.