Ha-Joon Chang Quotes
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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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Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life.
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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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Being told by the IMF to go easy on austerity is like being told by the Spanish Inquisition to be more tolerant of heretics.
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When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.
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People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.
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95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.
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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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A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments.
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It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.
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Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
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I don't drink at lunchtime because I'm very weak at alcohol like most Asians.
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Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment.
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I'm not an anti-capitalist, or anarchist. I want capitalism to work.
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Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.
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Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.
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Gone are the days when the upper classes were terrified of the angry mob wanting to smash their skulls and confiscate their properties. Now their biggest enemy is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy.
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History is on the side of the regulators.
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Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.
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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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The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might rather than market forces.
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I used to joke that I came to England - not to the U.S. where most Koreans go - because I like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
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The feeling of insecurity is inimical to our sense of wellbeing, as it causes anxiety and stress, which harms our physical and mental health. It is no surprise then that, according to some surveys, workers across the world value job security more highly than wages.
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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.