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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
Made
Essentials
Remaining
Complicated
Explained
Terms
Technical
Percent
Plain
Term
Reasoning
Common
Economics
Sense
Details
Even
Essential

More quotes by Ha-Joon Chang

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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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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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Culture changes with economic development.
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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.
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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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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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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
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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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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.
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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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The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
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Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
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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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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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People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
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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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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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Countries are poor not because their people are lazy their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
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The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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