Ha-Joon Chang Quotes
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To put it bluntly, there isn't one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore's success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.
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To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other forms.
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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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Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
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It is one thing to tell the citizens of some faraway country to go to hell, but it is another to do the same to your own citizens, who are supposedly your ultimate sovereigns.
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Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.
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Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.
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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.
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Economics should be defined in terms of what it is about. It should be about how people produce things, how people exchange them, how people earn income, how they pay taxes, how the government provides infrastructure with tax revenue, and how it conducts monetary policy. The subject has to be defined in terms of the object of inquiry.
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Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.
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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.
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It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone.
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When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.
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Charities are now working to give people in poor countries access to the Internet. But shouldn't we spend that money on providing health clinics and safe water? Aren't these things more relevant? I have no intention of downplaying the importance of the Internet, but its impact has been exaggerated.
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The economy is much bigger than the market. We will not be able to build a good economy - nor a good society - unless we look at the vast expanse beyond the market.
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Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.
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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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I like all kinds of music - classical, pop, rock, electronic.
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Markets are, in the end, man-made devices for utilitarian purposes, not a force of nature that we should not try to resist. If they end up serving the interests of only a tiny minority, as is increasingly the case, we have the right - and indeed the duty - to regulate them in the interest of greater social good.
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Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it's not just about money and political power.
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What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.
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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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By liberating women from household work and helping to abolish professions such as domestic service, the washing machine and other household goods completely revolutionised the structure of society.
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Basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies.