Quotes from Ha-Joon Chang

In fact, most successful people are those who have been well supported, financially and emotionally, by their parents when they were children. Likewise, as I discussed in chapter 2, the rich countries liberalized their trade only when their producers were ready, and usually only gradually even then. In other words, historically, trade liberalization has been the outcome rather than the cause of economic development.

Britain also banned exports from its colonies that competed with its own products, home and abroad. It banned cotton textile imports from India ('calicoes'), which were then superior to the British ones. In 1699 it banned the export of woolen cloth from its colonies to other countries (the Wool Act), destroying the Irish woolen industry and stifling the emergence of woollen manufacture in America.

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.

In recommending free trade to developing countries, the Bad Samaritans point out that all the rich countries have free(ish) trade. This is, however, like people advising the parents of a six-year old boy to make him get a job, arguing that successful adults don't live off their parents and, therefore, that being independent must be the reason for their successes. They do not realize that those adults are independent because they are successful, and not the other way around.

95 per cent of economics is common sense made complicated

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.

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

the demands of a highly organized industrial society made people behave in more disciplined, calculating and cooperative ways.

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

Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today's rich countries, when it simply had not been practised very much before they became rich.

The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

the human tendency to be seduced by a theory that supposedly explains everything.

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

It always seems impossible until it is done.' NELSON MANDELA

Audite et alteram partem

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.

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

Our story of bus drivers reveals the existence of the proverbial elephant in the room. It shows that the living standards of the huge majority of people in rich countries critically depend on the existence of the most draconian control over their labour markets – immigration control.

If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

George W. Bush, the former US president, is reputed to have complained that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneurship in their language.

In developed countries, unemployment due to trade adjustment may not be a matter of life and death, but in developing countries it often is. This is why we need to be more cautious with trade liberalization in poorer economies.

Today, South Korea is one of the world's industrial powerhouses, whike North Korea languishes in poverty. Much of this is thanks to the fact that South Korea aggressively traded with the outside world and actively absorbed foreign technologies while North Korea pursued its doctrine of self-sufficiency.

As for Africa, its per capita income grew relatively slowly even in the 1960s and t he 1970s (1-2% a year). But since the 1980s, the region has seen a fall in living standards. This record is a damning indictment of the neoliberal orthodoxy, because most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century.

The importance of international trade for economic development cannot be overemphasized. But free trade is not the best path to economic development. Trade helps economic development only when the country employs a mixture of protection and open trade, constantly adjusting it according to its changing needs and capabilities. Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists.