Ha-Joon Chang

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The number that rewired my thinking was not a productivity multiplier or an adoption curve. It was a tariff rate.

Forty to fifty percent. That was the average US duty on manufactured imports during the century America became the world's dominant industrial power. I had spent my career inside the mythology that markets built Silicon Valley, that entrepreneurial genius conjured the internet, that the garage was the origin story. Chang's tariff schedules — plain, dull, undeniable — told a different story. Every piece of infrastructure I build on was constructed behind protective walls, with public money, over decades. The garage came after. The state came first.

I needed Chang because You On AI has a blind spot, and I would rather name it than pretend it does not