Top 94 Ha Joon Chang Quotes
#1. The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Ha-Joon Chang
#2. The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.
Ha-Joon Chang
#3. We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being.
Ha-Joon Chang
#4. People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#5. Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies, and few ever will.
Ha-Joon Chang
#6. The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
Ha-Joon Chang
#7. Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.
Ha-Joon Chang
#8. Many people think that the U.S. is ahead in the frontier technology sectors as a result of private sector entrepreneurship. It's not. The U.S. federal government created all these sectors.
Ha-Joon Chang
#9. George W. Bush, the former US president, is reputed to have complained that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneurship in their language.
Ha-Joon Chang
#10. It is time that we dispensed with the myth that the market is a force of nature that should not be meddled with. Markets are social creations that can be, and have been, modified for social purposes.
Ha-Joon Chang
#11. Manufacturing is the most important ... route to prosperity.
Ha-Joon Chang
#12. Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.
Ha-Joon Chang
#13. In manufacturing, where mechanization and the use of chemical processes are much easier, it is easier to raise productivity than in services. In contrast, by their very nature, many service activities are inherently impervious to productivity increase without diluting the quality of the product.
Ha-Joon Chang
#14. The washing machine changed the world more than the Internet.
Ha-Joon Chang
#15. This is known as the Pareto criterion and forms the basis for all judgements on social improvements in Neoclassical economics today.
Ha-Joon Chang
#16. When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.
Ha-Joon Chang
#17. People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
Ha-Joon Chang
#19. Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past.
Ha-Joon Chang
#20. Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.
Ha-Joon Chang
#21. People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
Ha-Joon Chang
#22. 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
#23. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other forms.
Ha-Joon Chang
#24. Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.
Ha-Joon Chang
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. [Good managers] know that people have 'good' sides and 'bad' sides and that the secret of good management is in magnifying the former and toning down the latter.
Ha-Joon Chang
#29. Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it's not just about money and political power.
Ha-Joon Chang
#30. What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.
Ha-Joon Chang
#31. This approach has enabled Japanese firms to achieve such production efficiency and quality that now many non-Japanese companies are imitating them. By not assuming the worst about their workers, the Japanese companies have got the best out of them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#32. If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.
Ha-Joon Chang
#33. Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce and for potential students to know what professions to study for.
Ha-Joon Chang
#34. Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
Ha-Joon Chang
#35. Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?
Ha-Joon Chang
#36. Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.
Ha-Joon Chang
#37. We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
Ha-Joon Chang
#38. The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might rather than market forces.
Ha-Joon Chang
#39. Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#40. Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.
Ha-Joon Chang
#41. Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music ... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.
Ha-Joon Chang
#42. Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential.
Ha-Joon Chang
#43. I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, 'Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning.' I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking - which has really been harmful.
Ha-Joon Chang
#44. Economists like to strike the pose of a scientist. I know, because I often do it myself. When I teach undergraduates, I very consciously describe the field of economics as a science, so no student would start the course thinking he was embarking on some squishy academic endeavor.'1
Ha-Joon Chang
#45. 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
#47. I'm not an anti-capitalist, or anarchist. I want capitalism to work.
Ha-Joon Chang
#48. 95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
Ha-Joon Chang
#49. Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
Ha-Joon Chang
#50. To put it bluntly, there isn't one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore's success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.
Ha-Joon Chang
#51. The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
Ha-Joon Chang
#52. I used to joke that I came to England - not to the U.S. where most Koreans go - because I like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
Ha-Joon Chang
#53. Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.
Ha-Joon Chang
#54. Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.
Ha-Joon Chang
#56. The feeling of insecurity is inimical to our sense of wellbeing, as it causes anxiety and stress, which harms our physical and mental health. It is no surprise then that, according to some surveys, workers across the world value job security more highly than wages.
Ha-Joon Chang
#57. I don't drink at lunchtime because I'm very weak at alcohol like most Asians.
Ha-Joon Chang
#58. 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
#59. Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life.
Ha-Joon Chang
#60. Patent monopoly creates a lot of problems. It allows the patentee to charge the maximum to consumers. This may not be a problem if the patented product is a luxury item, like parts that go into a smartphone, but can violate basic human rights if it involves things such as life-saving drugs.
Ha-Joon Chang
#61. Economics is (almost) about Life, the Universe and Everything.
Ha-Joon Chang
#62. 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
#63. Charities are now working to give people in poor countries access to the Internet. But shouldn't we spend that money on providing health clinics and safe water? Aren't these things more relevant? I have no intention of downplaying the importance of the Internet, but its impact has been exaggerated.
Ha-Joon Chang
#64. Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
Ha-Joon Chang
#65. 95 percent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 percent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.
Ha-Joon Chang
#66. It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.
Ha-Joon Chang
#67. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.
Ha-Joon Chang
#68. As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.
Ha-Joon Chang
#69. By liberating women from household work and helping to abolish professions such as domestic service, the washing machine and other household goods completely revolutionised the structure of society.
Ha-Joon Chang
#70. Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
Ha-Joon Chang
#71. As someone from a developing country, I have a problem with rich countries thinking they can tell us anything, simply because they are giving money.
Ha-Joon Chang
#72. Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.
Ha-Joon Chang
#73. There are different ways to organise capitalism. Free-market capitalism is only one of them-and not a very good one at that.
Ha-Joon Chang
#74. Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#75. It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone.
Ha-Joon Chang
#76. the chance of an average developing-country person being an entrepreneur is more than twice that for a developed-country person (30 per cent vs. 12.8 per cent).
Ha-Joon Chang
#77. The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
Ha-Joon Chang
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few.
Ha-Joon Chang
#81. I think this notion that public enterprises do not work and therefore nationalization will be a disaster, I mean, it's not supported by evidence.
Ha-Joon Chang
#82. Basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies.
Ha-Joon Chang
#83. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Ha-Joon Chang
#84. Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.
Ha-Joon Chang
#85. I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or - the worst of all abuses among economists - a 'sociologist.'
Ha-Joon Chang
#86. Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few.
Ha-Joon Chang
#87. When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.
Ha-Joon Chang
#88. There is a big logical jump between acknowledging the destructive nature of hyperinflation and arguing that the lower the rate of inflation, the better.
Ha-Joon Chang
#89. The economy is much bigger than the market. We will not be able to build a good economy - nor a good society - unless we look at the vast expanse beyond the market.
Ha-Joon Chang
#90. 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
#91. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#92. I like all kinds of music - classical, pop, rock, electronic.
Ha-Joon Chang
#93. The welfare state is the bankruptcy law for workers
Ha-Joon Chang
#94. It is one thing to tell the citizens of some faraway country to go to hell, but it is another to do the same to your own citizens, who are supposedly your ultimate sovereigns.
Ha-Joon Chang
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