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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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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
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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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There is no such thing as a free market.
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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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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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Countries are poor not because their people are lazy their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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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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The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
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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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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
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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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Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
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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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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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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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Culture changes with economic development.
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We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
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