Economist HA JOON CHANG

Ha-Joon Chang
Ha-Joon Chang , born 7 October 1963) is a South Korean institutional economist specialising in development economics. Currently a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge, Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, most notably Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002).In 2013 Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.[6]

Ha-Joon Chang

1. Influences Robert Rowthorn
Awards Gunnar Myrdal Prize 2003, Wassily Leontief Prize 2005

3. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, as well as to Oxfam and various United Nations agencies.He is also a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. In addition, Chang serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).

Chang is also known for being an important academic influence on the economist Rafael Correa, the former President of Ecuador.

4. Biography

After graduating from Seoul National University Department of Economics, he studied at the University of Cambridge, earning a PhD for his thesis entitled The political economy of industrial policy – reflections on the role of state intervention in 1991. Chang's contribution to heterodox economics started while studying under Robert Rowthorn, a leading British Marxist economist, with whom he worked on the elaboration of the theory of industrial policy, which he described as a middle way between central planning and unrestrained free market. His work in this area is part of a broader approach to economics known as institutionalist political economy which places economic history and socio-political factors at the centre of the evolution of economic practices.

5. Writing

In his book Kicking Away the Ladder (which won the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy's 2003 Gunnar Myrdal Prize), Chang argued that all major developed countries used interventionist economic policies in order to get rich and then tried to forbid other countries from doing similarly. The World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund come in for strong criticism from Chang for "ladder-kicking" of this type which, he argues, are the fundamental obstacle to poverty alleviation in the developing world. This and other work led to his being awarded the 2005 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought from the Global Development and Environment Institute (previous prize-winners include Amartya Sen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden and Robert Wade).

The book's methodology was criticized by Douglas Irwin, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and author of a 2011 study of the Smoot–Hawley tariff, writing on the website of the Economic History Association:

Chang only looks at countries that developed during the nineteenth century and a small number of the policies they pursued. He did not examine countries that failed to develop in the nineteenth century and see if they pursued the same heterodox policies only more intensively. This is a poor scientific and historical method. Suppose a doctor studied people with long lives and found that some smoked tobacco, but did not study people with shorter lives to see if smoking was even more prevalent. Any conclusions drawn only from the observed relationship would be quite misleading.

In contrast, Stanley Engerman, Professor of Economic History at Rochester University praised Chang's approach:

Ha-Joon Chang has examined a large body of historical material to reach some very interesting and important conclusions about institutions and economic development. Not only is the historical picture re-examined, but Chang uses this to argue the need for a changing attitude to the institutions desired in today's developing nations. Both as historical reinterpretation and policy advocacy, "Kicking Away the Ladder?" deserves a wide audience among economists, historians, and members of the policy establishment.

7. Following up on the ideas of Kicking Away the Ladder, Chang published Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism in December 2008. Chang countered Irwin's criticisms by arguing that countries that had failed to develop had generally followed free market policies. Chang also argued that while state interventionism sometimes produced economic failures, it had a better record than unregulated free market economies which, he maintained, very rarely succeeded in producing economic development.

He cited evidence that GDP growth in developing countries had been higher prior to external pressures recommending deregulation and extended his analysis to the failures of free trade to induce growth through privatisation and anti-inflationary policies. Chang's book won plaudits from Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz for its fresh insight and effective blend of contemporary and historical cases but was criticised by former World Bank economist William Easterly, who said that Chang used selective evidence in his book. Chang responded to Easterly's criticisms, asserting that Easterly misread his argument. Easterly in turn provided a counter-reply.

8. Chang's 2014 book, Economics: The User's Guide, is an introduction to economics, accessibly written for the general public. It is the first title in Penguin's revived new Pelican Books series.

QUOTES OF HA-JOON

Economics Quotes
1. 95 per cent of economics is common sense – made to look difficult, with the use of jargons and mathematics.
2. 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.

3. 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.

4.. Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.

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

6. 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.

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

8. Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

9. It always seems impossible until it is done.’ NELSON MANDELA
10. 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

12. 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.