Free market fallacies.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: 23 Things They Dont Tell You About Capitalism - Book review

23 Things They Dont Tell You

About Capitalism

By Ha-Joon Chang

Bloomsbury Press. 286 pages. $25 .

From Thorstein Veblen to John Kenneth Galbraith, there's a lineage of unconventional economists who have debunked mainstream economics--and have done it with wit and style. Ha-Joon Chang is the latest addition to this group.

Chang is a Korean-born professor currently teaching at Cambridge who has made a name for himself through his advocacy of an active government industrial policy to nurture and protect the manufacturing sector. (Ecuador President Rafael Correa is reportedly a fan.) In Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective , he exposed the hypocrisy of richer nations, which used tariffs and subsidies extensively in their history only to turn around and argue that developing countries should completely open themselves up to free trade and free markets. He followed this up with Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism , where he made his analysis more accessible to a general public.

Now, in 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism , Chang has sharpened his critique. You might think that the book is dry and scholarly. Not at all. Chang has a lightheartedness that makes 23 Things one of the most fun books dealing with economics I've come across.

The playfulness begins with an alternative table of contents, where Chang offers seven different ways of reading the book--the seventh being to read the book start to finish. And this tone extends throughout. Though the book is chock-a-block with eye-opening statistics, they are presented in an enjoyable way.

So, there is a passage comparing the wages of Swedish and Indian bus drivers. Chang asks why Swedish drivers are paid nearly fifty times more when their Indian counterparts have to display nerves of steel on a typical Indian road.

His answer is that Sweden's top managers, scientists, and engineers are so much more productive than their Indian equivalents that they pull up everybody's wages. Chang provides the moral to this story: "Instead of blaming their own poor people for dragging the country down, the rich of the poor countries should ask themselves why they cannot pull the rest of their countries up as much as the rich of the rich countries do."

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Chang is crystal clear about the calamitous effects of neoliberal economics on our planet. "[The global economic] catastrophe has ultimately been created by...