131 Quotes by 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."

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"Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer."

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"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."

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"The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them."

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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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"If we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them."

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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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"People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it."

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"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."

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"Once poor people are persuaded that their poverty is their own fault, that whoever has made a lot of money must deserve it and that they too could become rich if they tried hard enough, life becomes easier for the rich."

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