131 Quotes by 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.

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

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

Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.

There is a big logical jump between acknowledging the destructive nature of hyperinflation and arguing that the lower the rate of inflation, the better.

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.

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.

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.