Ha-Joon Chang

• 1. Introduction

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  Ha-Joon Chang opens his book Kicking Away the Ladder with a charge that sounds almost like an accusation. The rich countries of the world, he argues, climbed to wealth using one set of tools, then turned around and told everyone behind them to use another. Born on the 7th of October 1963 in South Korea, Chang has spent his career studying how nations actually get rich, rather than how they are told to get rich. He specialises in institutional economics and development. His ideas have made him a bestselling author, a consultant to some of the most powerful financial bodies on the planet, and a named World Thinker. So who decides which economic policies a poor country is allowed to use? Why does Chang accuse the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund of blocking the way out of poverty? And how did a student from Seoul end up reshaping the debate over free trade from a classroom in Cambridge?

• 2. The Cambridge Years

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  After graduating from Seoul National University's Department of Economics, Chang crossed the world to study at the University of Cambridge. There he earned an MPhil and then a PhD, awarded in 1991 for a thesis titled The Political Economy of Industrial Policy. From 1990 to 2021 he lectured in economics at Cambridge, a tenure spanning more than three decades. In 2022 he became professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, known as SOAS.

  Robert Rowthorn shaped the young economist's thinking in those early Cambridge years. Rowthorn was a leading British Marxist economist, and under him Chang worked on the theory of industrial policy. Chang described that policy as a middle way between central planning and an unrestrained free market. This was not a search for compromise for its own sake. It grew from a broader school of thought called institutionalist political economy, which puts economic history and socio-political factors at the centre of how economic practices evolve. Chang's later books would carry that historical method to a wide public audience.

• 3. Kicking Away The Ladder

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  All the major developed countries, Chang argued in Kicking Away the Ladder, used interventionist economic policies to get rich. Then, having reached the top, they tried to forbid other countries from doing the same thing. He gave this practice the vivid name that titles the book. The metaphor casts the wealthy nations as climbers who pull the ladder up behind them.

  The World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund draw Chang's strongest criticism for exactly this ladder-kicking. He argues that it is the fundamental obstacle to poverty alleviation in the developing world. The poor countries, in his telling, are being denied the very tools that built the rich ones.

  Published in 2002, the book collected major honours from the economics profession. It won the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy's Gunnar Myrdal Prize in 2003. Two years later it earned the 2005 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought, awarded by the Global Development and Environment Institute. Previous winners of that prize include Amartya Sen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden, and Robert Wade, placing Chang among a distinguished line of dissenting economists.

• 4. From Trade To Capitalism

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  In December 2008, Chang followed up his ladder argument with Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. The book carried forward the ideas of Kicking Away the Ladder, training the same historical lens on the story free trade tells about itself.

  23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism arrived in 2011, and it changed the scope of his project. The book offers a twenty-three point rebuttal to aspects of neo-liberal capitalism. Among its assertions are that making rich people richer does not make the rest of us richer, and that companies should not be run in the interests of their owners. One of its claims is deliberately provocative: that the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has. Where his earlier books mainly critiqued neo-liberal capitalism as it touched the developing world, here Chang widened his aim. He began to question the assumptions of the neo-liberal system across all countries, not just the poor ones.

  Chang's 2014 book, Economics: The User's Guide, turned to a gentler task. It is an introduction to economics written for the general public, a doorway for readers who had never studied the subject.

• 5. The Adviser

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  Chang has sat across the table from the institutions his books criticise. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the same body he charges with ladder-kicking, along with the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank. His advisory work also reached the charity Oxfam and various United Nations agencies.

  In Washington, D.C., Chang holds a fellowship at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He also serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty, a body known by the initials ASAP. In 2013, Prospect magazine ranked him as one of the top 20 World Thinkers, a measure of how far his arguments had travelled beyond the lecture hall.

• 6. A Family Of Thinkers

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  Chang's questioning of received wisdom runs in the family. He is the son of Chang Jae-sik, a former minister of industry and resources, a background close to the very industrial policy his work examines. His brother, Hasok Chang, is a historian and philosopher of science. His cousin, Chang Ha-Seong, is a prominent economist and professor at Korea University.

  He lives in Cambridge, the city where his academic life began, with his wife, Hee-Jeong Kim, and their two children, Yuna and Jin-Gyu. In 2022 he published Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World, a title that promised to explain the global economy through the lens of food.