Boyd

“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

“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

“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

“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