Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean institutional economist and professor at the University of London's SOAS, previously a long-serving faculty member at Cambridge University. Born in Seoul in 1963, he came of age during South Korea's rapid industrialization under state-directed capitalism — an experience that would fundamentally shape his skepticism of free-market orthodoxy. He received his PhD from Cambridge and became one of the most widely read heterodox economists writing in English today.

His 2002 book "Kicking Away the Ladder" argued that wealthy nations used activist industrial policy and protectionism to develop their economies, then — once dominant — promoted free trade rules that prevented poorer nations from using the same tools. The argument was both historical and polemical: rich countries were, in effect, pulling up the ladder behind them. This work won the Gunnar Myrdal Prize and established Chang as a serious critic of the Washington Consensus operating from within mainstream academic economics rather than from the margins.

"Bad Samaritans" (2007) extended this critique to the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, documenting how structural adjustment programs forced developing countries to liberalize before their industries could compete. His bestselling "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" (2010) brought heterodox economics to a general audience, systematically dismantling neoliberal claims about free markets, immigration, privatization, and trickle-down growth. "Economics: The User's Guide" (2014) offered a pluralist survey of economic schools, explicitly arguing that no single framework captures economic reality.

Chang's intellectual project is rooted in the history of economic thought and development economics. He draws on Friedrich List, Albert Hirschman, and the developmental state literature to make the case that capitalism requires active management, that institutions matter enormously, and that the "free market" is itself a political construction. He is not anti-capitalist but is sharply critical of financialized, shareholder-value capitalism and the ideology that markets naturally produce optimal outcomes. His work is widely assigned in development studies, political economy, and public policy programs worldwide.