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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: 60
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Lazy
Countries
Poor
Country
People

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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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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There is no such thing as a free market.
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The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
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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 Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
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Culture changes with economic development.
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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
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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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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 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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Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
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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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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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History is on the side of the regulators.
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People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
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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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