Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

In America, the 1 percent and the 10 percent are doing just fine, but the people who are bearing the brunt of this economy are the ones who suffer.

Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.

The world has also learned that economic growth, by itself, cannot close the gap between rich and poor.

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

This administration and the leadership in Congress appear to be intent on valuing wealth over work, thereby placing working families at a distinct disadvantage.

Are we interested in treating the symptoms of poverty and economic stagnation through income redistribution and class warfare, or do we want to go at the root causes of poverty and economic stagnation by promoting pro-growth policies that promote prosperity?

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.

The Obama economy is great for rich people. It's terrible for everybody else.

We still have a great amount of work to do in social development, including resolving one of the biggest challenges we face in this area, namely, reducing the gap between high-income earners and people, citizens of our country, who are still living on very modest means indeed. But we cannot, of course, adopt the solution used 80 years ago and simply confiscate the riches of some to redistribute among others. We will use completely different means to resolve this problem, namely, we will ensure good economic growth.

The rich people are those who create wealth, and you have to treat them well so they continue to give wealth.

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

The fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday. And we've had a concerted policy of taking money away from the poor and giving it to the rich wholesale, and at the same time, we have the runaway corporations, and the greed.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

China is soon to be probably the most powerful nation in the world, but they only making like $10,000 a year, and that's doing it. They're balling on $10,000 a year, and this is the strongest nation? But it's a billion people. The way it breaks down, if you really look at it, it's still built on the poor, on the backs of hundreds of millions of destitute, impoverished farmers that you'll never see. You just see Shanghai and you see Hong Kong.

Budget cuts if you're not rich, tax cuts if you are. Less money for those who don't have any and more to those who do. That's how President Fredo says we're going to get out of the giant deficit hole he's dug. You can't put it any more simply. Rich people richer. Poor people poorer.

Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world, because it is the only system where you can make poor people richer and you don't have to make rich people poor.

Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.

There are rich people, and there are those who have money. They are not the same people.

Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?