About the book, from the publisher:
A rising young star in the field of economics attacks the free-trade orthodoxy of The World Is Flat head-on — a crisp, contrarian history of global capitalism.
One economist has called Ha-Joon Chang “the most exciting thinker our profession has turned out in the past fifteen years.” With Bad Samaritans, this provocative scholar bursts into the debate on globalization and economic justice.
Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the “World Is Flat” orthodoxy of Thomas 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, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization — ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world.
Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct — but developed our own industries by studiously copying others’ technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth — but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps.
Among the early acclaim for Bad Samaritans:
"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."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"the best riposte from the critics that I have seen...Readers who are leery of open-market orthodoxy will rejoice at the cogency of Bad Samaritans. Ha-Joon Chang has the credentials -- he's on the economics faculty at Cambridge University -- and the storytelling skill to make a well-informed, engaging case against the dogma propagated by globalization's cheerleaders. Believers in free trade will find that the book forces them to recalibrate and maybe even backpedal a bit….Chang's book deserves a wide readership for illuminating the need for humility about the virtues of private markets and free trade, especially in the developing world.”—Paul Blustein, Washington Post— New York Sun
“a lively addition to the protectionist side of the debate…well written and far more serious than most anti-globalization gibberish.”
“A smart, lively, and provocative book that offers us compelling new ways of looking at globalization.”—Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001
“I recommend this book to people who have any interest in these issues—i.e. everyone.”
—Bob Geldof
“Every orthodoxy needs effective critics. Ha-Joon Chang is probably the world’s most effective critic of globalization. He does not deny the benefits to developing countries of integration into the world economy. But he draws on the lessons of history to argue that they must be allowed to integrate on their own terms.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times, author of Why Globalization Works
Watch a video of Ha-Joon Chang discussing his book.
Ha-Joon Chang is Reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about his research and publications at his Cambridge webpage.
The Page 99 Test: Bad Samaritans.
--Marshal Zeringue
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