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Back in the late 1980s all the talk was about studying the Japanese economic model, which quickly went away in the following decade as that nation sank into economic doldrums. Perhaps we should have paid more attention to what the Germans were doing. Harold Meyerson describes in today's Washington Post what he terms "the Jimmy Stewart" approach to managing the economy: a local centric system that does a better job of limiting unemployment and maintaining the ability to ramp up production as needed. Thus Germany's export/import balance is second only to China's.