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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
Explained
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Technical
Terms
Plain
Percent
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Economics
Common
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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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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 foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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History is on the side of the regulators.
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The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
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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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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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The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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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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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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We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
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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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Culture changes with economic development.
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There is no such thing as a free market.
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