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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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Ha-Joon Chang
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Society
Fundamental
Need
Block
Needs
Fundamentals
Balance
Level
Blocks
Building
Clash
Levels
Markets
Democracy
Decent

More quotes by 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.
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Culture changes with economic development.
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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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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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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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The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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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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History is on the side of the regulators.
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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 invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
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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 Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
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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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There is no such thing as a free market.
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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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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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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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