Chang Ha-Joon

Quotes

1. All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency—the principal–agent problem, the and the soft budget constraint—are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership—it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships.

   p. 116

2. 

   The has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical s involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.

   p. 16

3. 

   I... tell... how numbers in economics are defined and put together... not as... objective as... weight or... temperature...

4. 

   Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

   p. 158

5. 

   The days are over when technology can be advanced in laboratories by individual scientists alone. Now you need an army of lawyers to negotiate the hazardous terrain of interlocking patents. Unless we find a solution to the problem of interlocking patents, the patent system may actually impede the very innovation it was designed to encourage.

   p. 128

6. 

   Producers in developing countries entering new industries need a period of (partial) insulation from international competition (through protection, subsidies and other measures) before they can build up their capabilities to compete with superior foreign producers. Of course, when the infant producers 'grow up' and are able to compete with the more advanced producers, the insulation should go. But this has to be done gradually. If they are exposed to too much international competition too soon, they are bound to disappear.

   p. 73

7. 

   Corruption often exists because there are too many market forces, not too few.

   p. 170

8. 

   Culture changes with .

   p. 196

9. 

   The standard Neoclassical definition of economics... is... by Lionel Robbins... 'the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses'... [is] by... theoretical approach rather than... subject matter... a study of rational choice... deliberate, systematic ... The subject of the calculation can be anything...

10. 

    I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living. I pay for his lodging, food, education and health care. But millions of children of his age already have jobs. Daniel Defoe, in the 18th century, thought that children could earn a living from the age of four.

    Moreover, working might do Jin-Gyu's character a world of good. Right now he lives in an economic bubble with no sense of the value of money. He has zero appreciation of the efforts his mother and I make on his behalf, subsidizing his idle existence and cocooning him from harsh reality. He is over-protected and needs to be exposed to competition, so that he can become a more productive person. Thinking about it, the more competition he is exposed to and the sooner this is done, the better it will be for his future development. It will whip him into a mentality that is ready for hard work. I should make him quit school and get a job. Perhaps I could move to a country where child labour is still tolerated, if not legal, to give him more choice in employment.

    p. 65

11. 

    As water flows from high to low, knowledge has always flowed from where there is more to where there is less. Those countries that are better at absorbing the knowledge inflow have been more successful in catching up with the more economically advanced nations. On the other side of the fence, those advanced nations that are good at controlling the outflow of core technologies have retained their technological leadership for longer. The technological '', between backward countries trying to acquire advanced foreign knowledge and the advanced countries trying to prevent its outflow has always been at the heart of the game of .

    p. 127

12. 

    History is on the side of the regulators.

    p. 96