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We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.

Ha-Joon Chang

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Ha-Joon Chang
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 7
Economist
Seoul Teukbyeolsi
Leave
Enough
Things
Market
Smart

More quotes by Ha-Joon Chang

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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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 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.
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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.
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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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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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
Ha-Joon Chang
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History is on the side of the regulators.
Ha-Joon Chang
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The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
Ha-Joon Chang