Ha-Joon Chang Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Ha-Joon Chang quote about:
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“Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.”
-- 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.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“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 -
“Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.”
-- 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.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“History is on the side of the regulators.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few.”
-- 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.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Culture changes with economic development.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang -
“Manufacturing is the most important ... route to prosperity.”
-- Ha-Joon Chang
