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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.

Ha-Joon Chang

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Ha-Joon Chang
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Common
Economics
Sense
Details
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Essential
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Complicated
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More quotes by Ha-Joon Chang

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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
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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.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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
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History is on the side of the regulators.
Ha-Joon Chang
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The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
Ha-Joon Chang
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Countries are poor not because their people are lazy their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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
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The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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
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People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
Ha-Joon Chang
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There is no such thing as a free market.
Ha-Joon Chang
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Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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
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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.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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.
Ha-Joon Chang
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We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
Ha-Joon Chang
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Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.
Ha-Joon Chang
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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
Ha-Joon Chang
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Culture changes with economic development.
Ha-Joon Chang