The free-market ideology bases its assumptions on the misguided notion that people make completely rational financial decisions, but government intervention can help.

Here are the 3 most interesting lessons I’ve learned about capitalism:

More importantly, though, you will get a picture of how we can solve these issues and the better world they may offer everybody. In Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, you’ll learn all about the problems with free-market economics. The good news is that there are other options, but unfortunately, these are ignored by the media and we never hear about them. Other than not being very scientific, it’s based on many false ideas about the way society and the economy work.

It prizes little government involvement in the financial world.Īlthough it sounds appealing, there is a lot wrong with this view. This method centers around letting supply and demand govern reign supreme.

If you listen to economic experts in newspapers or on TV, they talk as if there’s only one theory to follow: free-market economics. Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account: 9 in the Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers 2014 poll. He is the winner of the 2003 Gunnar Myrdal Prize and the 2005 Wassily Leontief Prize. Worldwide, his books have sold nearly 2 million copies. He is also a fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.īy the end of 2016, his writings will have been translated and published in 40 languages and 43 countries. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank as well as to Oxfam. His previous book “Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World” (2007) was “A smart, lively and provocative book that offers us compelling new ways to look at globalisation” (Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001). An easily accessible read, the book challenges some widely-held assumptions about market economics: There’s no such thing as a “free” market Globalisation isn’t making the world richer We don’t live in a digital world – the washing machine has changed more lives than the internet Poor countries are more entrepreneurial than rich ones Higher-paid managers don’t produce better results. He is author of several widely discussed books including “23 Things They Don’t Tell you About Capitalism” (2010). He lectures in the Economics of Development at Cambridge University and is a regular contributor to The Guardian since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

Ha-Joon is one of the world’s leading economists specialising in development economics.

Joon chang