Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean economist and academic born on the 7th of October 1963. He specialises in institutional economics and development, and he is the author of several bestselling books on economics and development policy.
Kicking Away the Ladder, published in 2002, argues that all major developed countries used interventionist economic policies to get rich and then tried to forbid other countries from doing the same. It strongly criticises the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund for this ladder-kicking, which Chang calls the fundamental obstacle to poverty alleviation in the developing world.
Ha-Joon Chang lectured in economics at the University of Cambridge from 1990 to 2021. In 2022 he became professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, known as SOAS.
Kicking Away the Ladder won the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy's 2003 Gunnar Myrdal Prize and the 2005 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. In 2013, Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.
Released in 2011-23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism offers a twenty-three point rebuttal to aspects of neo-liberal capitalism. Its assertions include that making rich people richer does not make the rest of us richer, and that the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has.
Ha-Joon Chang has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, Oxfam, and various United Nations agencies. He is also a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty.