Ha-Joon Chang > Quotes

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

“If the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught. The world works as it does only because people are not the totally self seeking agents that free-market economics believes them to be. We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“95% of economics is common sense”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction

“The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth. Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

“In no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries....The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan -- in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan -- shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“A well-designed welfare state can actually encourage people to take chances with their jobs and be more, not less, open to changes.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Once poor people are persuaded that their poverty is their own fault, that whoever has made a lot of money must deserve it and that they too could become rich if they tried hard enough, life becomes easier for the rich.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction

“If we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“free trade economists have argued that the mere co-existence of protectionism and economic development does not prove that the former caused the latter. This is true. But I am at least trying to explain one phenomenon - economic development-with another that co-existed with it - protectionism. Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today's rich countries, when it simply had not been practised very much before they became rich.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

“Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.

Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“95 per cent of economics is common sense – made to look difficult, with the use of jargons and mathematics.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

“Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Not being able to see this, culture-based explanations for economic development have usually been little more than ex post facto justifications based on a 20/20 hindsight vision. So, in the early days of capitalism, when most economically successful countries happened to be Protestant Christian, many people argued that Protestantism was uniquely suited to economic development. When Catholic France, Italy, Austria and southern Germany developed rapidly, particularly after the Second World War, Christianity, rather than Protestantism, became the magic culture. Until Japan became rich, many people thought East Asia had not developed because of Confucianism. But when Japan succeeded, this thesis was revised to say that Japan was developing so fast because its unique form of Confucianism emphasized co-operation over individual edification, which the Chinese and Korean versions allegedly valued more highly. And then Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea also started doing well, so this judgement about the different varieties of Confucianism was forgotten. Indeed, Confucianism as a whole suddenly became the best culture for development because it emphasized hard work, saving, education and submission to authority. Today, when we see Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand and even Hindu India doing well economically, we can soon expect to encounter new theories that will trumpet how uniquely all these cultures are suited for economic development (and how their authors have known about it all along).”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

“Sometimes it is in the long-run interest of the business sector to restrict the freedom of individual firms so that they do not destroy the common pool of resources that all of them need, such as natural resources or the labour force.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“all technical professions have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated than they really are so that they can justify the high fees their members charge for their services.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

“why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

“Harry S. Truman, in his typical no-nonsense style, once said that ‘An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he would not be an expert.’ Expert knowledge is absolutely necessary, but”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide

“The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict the freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism

“Ricardo's theory is absolutely right-within its narrow confines. His theory correctly says that, accepting their current levels of technology as given, it is better for countries to specialize in things that they are relatively better at. One cannot argue with that.

His theory fails when a country wants to acquire more advanced technologies so that it can do more difficult things that few others can do- that is, when it wants to develop its economy. It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries. Ricardo's theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism