Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

When Becker titled... The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, he was... declaring... economics is about everything.

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.

Unlike what neo-liberals say, market and democracy clash at a fundamental level. Democracy runs on the principle of 'one man (one person), one vote'. The market runs on the principle of 'one dollar, one vote'. Naturally, the former gives equal weight to each person, regardless of the money she/he has. The latter give greater weight to richer people. Therefore, democratic decisions usually subvert the logic of market.

[T]his crisis... has affected the way we produce things... [F]ace-to-face services have been devastated, restaurants, theaters, international tourism, things that require close proximity of the provider and the customer, has been hit very hard... Different societies are trying to deal with this in different ways... [Y]ou see these pictures of Asian restaurants that have... put the tapes on the tables... shields, [etc.]... [T]hese services will not recover the previous levels any time soon.

[T]o summarize... one... expansion of the universal welfare state and inclusion of the... care economy... second, rethinking our priorities, and thirdly, restructuring and redesigning the economic system so they can be more robust and resilient.

History is on the side of the regulators.

Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for .

I try to explain... how to think, rather than what to think.

I... tell... how numbers in economics are defined and put together... not as... objective as... weight or... temperature...

We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.

Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few.

Also in the process, realizing that if we all... reduce our activities... cities like ... which has never seen... clear sky for many years... can have... blue sky... made people realize that we should and could do a lot more to fight .

I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living. I pay for his lodging, food, education and health care. But millions of children of his age already have jobs. Daniel Defoe, in the 18th century, thought that children could earn a living from the age of four.
Moreover, working might do Jin-Gyu's character a world of good. Right now he lives in an economic bubble with no sense of the value of money. He has zero appreciation of the efforts his mother and I make on his behalf, subsidizing his idle existence and cocooning him from harsh reality. He is over-protected and needs to be exposed to competition, so that he can become a more productive person. Thinking about it, the more competition he is exposed to and the sooner this is done, the better it will be for his future development. It will whip him into a mentality that is ready for hard work. I should make him quit school and get a job. Perhaps I could move to a country where child labour is still tolerated, if not legal, to give him more choice in employment.

Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you, or your claim on particular amounts of the society's resources.
How money and other financial claims... are created, sold and bought is... . ...[C]laims ...a lot of economics is (or should be) about those.

The historical picture is clear. ing was not invented in modern Asia. When they were backward themselves in terms of knowledge, all of today's rich countries blithely violated other people's patents, s and copyrights. The Swiss 'borrowed' German chemical inventions, while the Germans 'borrowed' English trademarks and the 'borrowed' British copyrighted materials—all without paying what would today be considered 'just' compensation.