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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.

Ha-Joon Chang

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Ha-Joon Chang
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Common
Sense
Made
Deliberately
Economics
Complicated

More quotes by 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.
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.
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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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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.
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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The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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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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History is on the side of the regulators.
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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Countries are poor not because their people are lazy their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
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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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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[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.
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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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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The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.
Ha-Joon Chang
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There is no such thing as a free market.
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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People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
Ha-Joon Chang