"Lucid, deeply informed, and enlivened with striking illustrations."
-Noam Chomsky
One economist has called Ha-Joon Chang "the most exciting thinker our
profession has turned out in the past fifteen years." With Bad
Samaritans, this provocative scholar bursts into the debate on
globalization and economic justice.
Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of
examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas
Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered
capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations
out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic
superpowers-from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea-all attained
prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in
industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a
fairy tale about the magic of free trade and-via our proxies such as the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade
Organization-ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the
developing world.
Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace
should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His
pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of
free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct-but
developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies.
We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth-but many
developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured
into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang
argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that
are struggling to follow in our footsteps.
