Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

51 quotes in 968 categories

• Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• [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…
• 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…
• There is no such thing as a free market.
• To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other forms.
• 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…
• The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.
• People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
• People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
• 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…

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