People always think they’re in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they’re like sausages: you don’t know what they really are until you cut into them. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
When I was growing up in South Korea in the ’70s and early ’80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we’d have no tax havens in the world. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it’s not just about money and political power. Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or – the worst of all abuses among economists – a ‘sociologist.’ Ha-Joon Chang Read Quote
