Every wealthy nation used protections to industrialize, then told developing nations to abandon them.
Ha-Joon Chang was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1963. He studied economics at Seoul National University and earned his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for decades before moving to SOAS University of London.1
His 2002 book Kicking Away the Ladder presented a historical argument with significant implications for how nations think about work and development. Chang demonstrated that every wealthy industrial nation, including Britain, the United States, and Germany, had built its economy behind protective tariffs, state subsidies, and strategic industrial policy.2
Once these nations achieved dominance, they pressured developing countries to adopt free trade and open markets, effectively forbidding the very strategies that had made them rich. The title came from a phrase used by the nineteenth-century German economist Friedrich List, who accused Britain of kicking away the ladder it had climbed.3
Chang's 2010 book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism reached a broader audience. It challenged assumptions that free markets produce optimal outcomes, that higher executive pay improves performance, and that education alone determines national prosperity.4
His analysis of South Korea's own transformation was particularly pointed. In the 1960s, South Korea's per capita income was lower than many African nations. Within two generations, it became one of the world's largest economies, using government-directed industrial policy, protected domestic firms, and heavy investment in specific industries chosen by state planners.5
Chang argues that the standard prescriptions handed to developing nations by international institutions, privatize, deregulate, and open markets, are not the product of economic science. They are the preferences of nations that have already industrialized, imposed on nations that have not.6 His work asks a question that extends well beyond macroeconomics: whether the rules that govern how people are allowed to work and develop are designed for their benefit, or for the benefit of those who established the rules.