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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
Smart
Leave
Enough
Things
Market

More quotes by Ha-Joon Chang

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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.
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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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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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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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
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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The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.
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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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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Culture changes with economic development.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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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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.
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
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The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
Ha-Joon Chang
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History is on the side of the regulators.
Ha-Joon Chang
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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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.
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 no such thing as a free market.
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