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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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Ha-Joon Chang
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Lazy
Countries
Poor
Country
People

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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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Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
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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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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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We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
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History is on the side of the regulators.
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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 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
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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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[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 foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
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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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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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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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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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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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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
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