Best 52 quotes of Ha-joon Chang on MyQuotes

Ha-joon Chang

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    Ha-joon Chang

    95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency - the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint - are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership - it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    As South Korea shows, active participation in international trade does not require free trade. Indeed, had South Korea pursued free trade and not promoted infant industries, it would not have become a major trading nation. It would still be exporting raw materials (e.g., tungsten ore, fish, seaweed) or low-technology, low-price products (e.g., textiles, garments, wigs made with human hair) that used to be its main export items in the 1960s.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Culture changes with economic development.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    [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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    Ha-joon Chang

    Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown we should simply ban complex financial instruments, unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. This is what we do all the time with other products-drugs, cars, electrical products and many others.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Manufacturing is the most important...route to prosperity.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rick as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    There are different ways to organise capitalism. Free-market capitalism is only one of them-and not a very good one at that.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    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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    Ha-joon Chang

    The washing machine changed the world more than the Internet.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth. Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other forms.

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    Ha-joon Chang

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

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    Ha-joon Chang

    As the saying goes, ‘he who has a hammer sees everything as a nail’. If you approach a problem from a particular theoretical point of view, you will end up asking only certain questions and answering them in particular ways. You might be lucky, and the problem you are facing might be a ‘nail’ for which your ‘hammer’ is the most appropriate tool. But, more often than not, you will need to have an array of tools available to you. You are bound to have your favourite theory. There is nothing wrong with using one or two more than others — we all do. But please don’t be a man (or a woman) with a hammer — still less someone unaware that there are other tools available. To extend the analogy, use a Swiss army knife instead, with different tools for different tasks.­

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    Ha-joon Chang

    As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith’s basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels. For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith’s scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    If the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught. The world works as it does only because people are not the totally self seeking agents that free-market economics believes them to be. We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    In no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries....The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan -- in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan -- shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US.

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    Ha-joon Chang

    Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.