A FEW months back, a Nobel laureate in economics was in Japan to speak at a conference. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who desperately wants to lift Japan’s economy after years of being wasted by secular stagnation, arranged for a meeting with the visiting professor, who had studied Japan’s “Lost Decade” extensively.

Mr. Abe wanted views from the visiting academic and he got them. Whether there was a profound shift in his policies after getting the views of the visiting professor in the serious hours PM Abe spent with him, we do not know. But it dramatized the value of ideas even in a country whose economy used to be called the most innovative and dynamic in the world. And is, despite its “lost” decades, still the world’s third largest economy. Ideas rock the world. Ideas unsettle the world and remake it in a fundamental way.