Read Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism By Ha-Joon Chang Full Books Online in HD Quality

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.

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

More Books

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein

Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

Yanis Varoufakis

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Yanis Varoufakis

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

Michael Parenti

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Daron Acemoğlu

Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power

Noam Chomsky

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

Jason Hickel

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

Kōhei Saitō

Future Stories: What's Next?

David Christian