Quotes from Ha-Joon Chang

Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.

Sometimes it is in the long-run interest of the business sector to restrict the freedom of individual firms so that they do not destroy the common pool of resources that all of them need, such as natural resources or the labour force.

The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict the freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition.

all technical professions have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated than they really are so that they can justify the high fees their members charge for their services.

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

why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?

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

Gore Vidal, the American writer, once famously described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

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.

Basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies.

Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few.

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.

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.

Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment.

I used to joke that I came to England - not to the U.S. where most Koreans go - because I like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.

The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might rather than market forces.

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.

It is one thing to tell the citizens of some faraway country to go to hell, but it is another to do the same to your own citizens, who are supposedly your ultimate sovereigns.

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.

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.

Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

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.

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