Top 50 Ha-Joon Chang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It always seems impossible until it is done.’ NELSON MANDELA.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

2. “Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

3. “95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

4. “To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the other forms.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

5. “The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

6. “Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

7. “There is no such thing as a free market.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

8. “There are different ways to organise capitalism. Free-market capitalism is only one of them-and not a very good one at that.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

11. “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

12. “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

13. “We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

14. “Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

15. “Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Ha-Joon Chang

19. “Culture changes with economic development.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

20. “The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

21. “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.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

22. “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

23. “Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

24. “Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are ‘lazy’ because they are poor.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

25. “Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

26. “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.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

27. “The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

28. “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

29. “Audite et alteram partem.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

30. “If we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

31. “95 per cent of economics is common sense – made to look difficult, with the use of jargons and mathematics.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

32. “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

33. “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

34. “The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

35. “History is on the side of the regulators.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

36. “It’s not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

37. “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 cent took 59 per cent.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

38. “The rich countries also contribute to the brain drain from developing countries by more willingly accepting people with higher skills. These are people who could have contributed more to the development of their own countries than unskilled immigrants, had they remained in their home countries.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

39. “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

40. “The washing machine changed the world more than the Internet.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

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

— Ha-Joon Chang

42. “People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

43. “Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

44. “Harry S. Truman, in his typical no-nonsense style, once said that ‘An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he would not be an expert.’ Expert knowledge is absolutely necessary, but.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

45. “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

46. “Gore Vidal, the American writer, once famously described the American economic system as ‘free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich’.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

47. “It is a law of competition that people who can do difficult things which others cannot will earn more profit.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

48. “The most important assumption underlying HOS is that all countries have equal productive capabilities – that is, they can use any technology they want.3.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

49. “Even in the richer countries, what happens at work can make people fulfilled, bored, valued or stressed. At the deepest level work shapes who we are.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

50. “I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists – and other experts – should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists.”

— Ha-Joon Chang