Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism » (Reprint)

Ha-Joon Chang has taught at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, since 1990. He has consulted for numerous international organizations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. He has published eleven books, including Kicking Away the Ladder, winner of the 2003 Myrdal Prize. In 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

“Lucid, deeply informed, and enlivened with striking illustrations, this penetrating study could be entitled ‘Economics in the Real World.’ Chang reveals the yawning gap between standard doctrines concerning economic development and what really has taken place from the origins of the industrial revolution until today. His incisive analysis shows how, and why, prescriptions based on reigning doctrines have caused severe harm, particularly to the most vulnerable and defenseless, and are likely to continue to do so.”—Noam Chomsky

Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the “World I s Flat” orthodoxy of T homas 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, I nternational Monetary Fund, and World T rade Organization—ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world.

Publishers Weekly

In the 1950s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, suffering the aftereffects of decades of brutal Japanese colonialism and war with its northern counterpart. During his childhood, Chang (Kicking Away the Ladder), a respected economist at the University of Cambridge, witnessed the beginnings of Korea's postwar economic miracle as Gen. Park Chung-Hee's dictatorship (despite its corrupt machinations) set the economic groundwork that would lift Korea out of poverty. Though Korea's strategies are "heretical" to first world, free-market economists, Chang argues that the world's wealthiest nations historically relied on the same heavy-handed protectionist approaches in their quests for economic hegemony. These wealthy, first world economies, which "preach free market and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and to pre-empt the emergence of possible competitors" are Chang's "bad Samaritans." Chang builds his outsider stance through a history of capitalism and globalization and stories of other struggling countries' economic transformations. The resulting polemic about the shortcomings of neoliberal economic theory's belief in unlimited free-market competition and its effect on the developing world is provocative and may hold the key to similar miracles for some of the world's most troubled economies. (Jan.)