Ha-Joon Chang on Churchillian capitalism 3/3

When the crash and the Great Depression came in 1929, it seemed to be a story foretold: Marx had been predicting the ever-amplifying cycles of economic activity, and whether or not you liked the idea, it seemed that history was following his script. Extremist communists and fascists certainly saw it as the end of capitalism. The crash of 2007 has produced no such extremism. Crashes come, booms go, but the system chugs along.

Ha-Joon Chang is an iconoclast amongst economists. Free trade has not made emerging countries richer, he thinks: his own Korea is a perfect example of the success of managed mercantilism. And he does not even get into back-breaking sophistry about oligopoly to do so. He simply observes that the world is not like the models of economists would have it and that there it is no great surprise to find their predictions are wrong.

He returns to the fray in a new book on 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, including: that our economies are still planned economies; that the washing machine has been more transformative than the internet; that the market does not pay the wage you deserve; that we do not want more efficient financial markets...In each case, Ha-Joon Chang employs the tactic of stripping theory out of the words that we use, reminding us that we should resist the bad science turning the world into its own misrepresentation of itself.

Ha-Joon Chang judges capitalism like Churchill judged democracy: a terrible system, but better than any of the alternatives. His plea is for us not to mistake the reality of the system for the poor simulacrum that the profession peddles.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Ha-Joon Chang
• Economie
• Economics
• Politics
• Politiek
• Neoliberlisme
• Kapitalisme
• Utopie
• Utopia
• Ayn Rand
• Rand
• Ayn
• Minsky

[MrDarkbloom]

'The vatican has a lot of smart people'. How to answer the interviewer brilliantly in one line.