Ha-Joon Chang Quotes & Sayings

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

Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market. — Ha-Joon Chang

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago. — Ha-Joon Chang

It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

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

As South Korea shows, active participation in international trade does not require free trade. Indeed, had South Korea pursued free trade and not promoted infant industries, it would not have become a major trading nation. It would still be exporting raw materials (e.g., tungsten ore, fish, seaweed) or low-technology, low-price products (e.g., textiles, garments, wigs made with human hair) that used to be its main export items in the 1960s. — Ha-Joon Chang

Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

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

We are not smart enough to leave things to the market. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

The washing machine changed the world more than the Internet. — Ha-Joon Chang

The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

During the past quarter of a century, most developing countries have liberalized trade to a huge degree. They were first pushed by the IMF and the World Bank in the aftermath of the Third World debt crisis of 1982. There was a further decisive impetus towards trade liberalization following the launch of the WTO in 1995. During the last decade or so, bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) have also proliferated.Unfortunately, during this period, developing countries have not done well at all, despite (or because of, in my view) massive trade liberalization, — Ha-Joon Chang

Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

Self-interest, to be sure, is one of the most important, but we have many other motives - honesty, self-respect, altruism, love, sympathy, faith, sense of duty, solidarity, loyalty, public-spiritedness, patriotism, and so on - that are sometimes even more important than self-seeking as the driver of our behaviors. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

95% of economics is common sense — Ha-Joon Chang

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

I don't drink at lunchtime because I'm very weak at alcohol like most Asians. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

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

Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market. — Ha-Joon Chang

Gone are the days when the upper classes were terrified of the angry mob wanting to smash their skulls and confiscate their properties. Now their biggest enemy is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy. — Ha-Joon Chang

Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists - and other experts - should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists — Ha-Joon Chang

The higher education system in these countries (US, Korea etc) has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, promoting the others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable. — Ha-Joon Chang

[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

Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential. — Ha-Joon Chang

People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

The welfare state is the bankruptcy law for workers — Ha-Joon Chang

Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor. — Ha-Joon Chang

The days are over when technology can be advanced in laboratories by individual scientists alone. Now you need an army of lawyers to negotiate the hazardous terrain of interlocking patents. Unless we find a solution to the problem of interlocking patents, the patent system may actually impede the very innovation it was designed to encourage. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract. — Ha-Joon Chang

All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith's basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels.
For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith's scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising. — Ha-Joon Chang

Assume the worst about people and you get the worst. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

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

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

This is known as the Pareto criterion and forms the basis for all judgements on social improvements in Neoclassical economics today. — Ha-Joon Chang

Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies, and few ever will. — Ha-Joon Chang

Culture changes with economic development. — Ha-Joon Chang

The data are not easy to come by, but a mid 1940s study by the US Rural Electrification Authority reports that, with the introduction of the electric washing machine and electric iron, the time required for washing a 38 lb load of laundry was reduced by a factor of nearly 6 (from 4 hours to 41 minutes) and the time taken to iron it by a factor of more than 2.5 (from 4.5 hours to 1.75 hours).2 Piped water has meant that women do not have to spend hours fetching water (for which, according to the United Nations Development Program, up to two hours per day are spent in some developing countries). Vacuum cleaners have enabled us to clean our houses more thoroughly in a fraction of the time that was needed in the old days, when we had to do it with broom and rags. — Ha-Joon Chang

Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science. — Ha-Joon Chang

The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history. — Ha-Joon Chang

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

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

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

People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

I'm not an anti-capitalist, or anarchist. I want capitalism to work. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

Manufacturing is the most important ... route to prosperity. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other forms. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

History is on the side of the regulators. — Ha-Joon Chang

Unless South Africa is — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few. — Ha-Joon Chang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated. — Ha-Joon Chang

Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it. — Ha-Joon Chang

Economics is (almost) about Life, the Universe and Everything. — Ha-Joon Chang