{"author":"Ha-Joon Chang","author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang","total_quotes":18,"quotes":[{"text":"A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["child","political","slavery "],"id":3129,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["environment","green","sustainability"],"id":13498,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"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 as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["business","social-justice"],"id":52197,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith’s basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels.For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith’s scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["adam-smith","advertising","capitalism","competition","ecomics","profit","propaganda","public-relations"],"id":65448,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"Economics should be defined in terms of what it is about. It should be about how people produce things, how people exchange them, how people earn income, how they pay taxes, how the government provides infrastructure with tax revenue, and how it conducts monetary policy. The subject has to be defined in terms of the object of inquiry.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["economics","people","tax "],"id":91831,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We should not approve of an unequal and brutal society because surveys show that people are happy. But who has the right to tell those oppressed women or starving landless peasants that they shouldn’t be happy, if they think they are? Does anyone have the right to make those people feel miserable by telling them the ‘truth’? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they definitely tell us that we cannot rely on ‘subjective’ happiness surveys to decide how well people are doing.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["economics","economy","false-consciousness","happiness","inequality","society"],"id":119818,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"Charities are now working to give people in poor countries access to the Internet. But shouldn't we spend that money on providing health clinics and safe water? Aren't these things more relevant? I have no intention of downplaying the importance of the Internet, but its impact has been exaggerated.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["money","water","internet "],"id":133751,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["democracy","economics","political-economy"],"id":167760,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["economics"],"id":237574,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ha-Joon Chang","tags":["equality","equity","opportunity","social-justice"],"id":255189,"author_id":"Ha-Joon+Chang"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":18,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}