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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.

Ha-Joon Chang

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Ha-Joon Chang
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Make
People
Richer
Wealth
Rest
Rich
Making
Doesn

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Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them.
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The free market doesn't exist. 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.
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There is a big logical jump between acknowledging the destructive nature of hyperinflation and arguing that the lower the rate of inflation, the better.
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The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
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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.
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History is on the side of the regulators.
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Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
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The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
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People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
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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.
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[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.
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There is no such thing as a free market.
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Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.
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Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
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Countries are poor not because their people are lazy their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
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The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.
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Culture changes with economic development.
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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.
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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.
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