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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
Market
Smart
Leave
Enough
Things

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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Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.
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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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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People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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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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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History is on the side of the regulators.
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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The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.
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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There is no such thing as a free market.
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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Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
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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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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The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
Ha-Joon Chang
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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.
Ha-Joon Chang
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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
Ha-Joon Chang
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Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.
Ha-Joon Chang