PERSON
Ha-Joon Chang
The heterodox economist who proved, with a historian's patience, that every wealthy nation built its prosperity through industrial intervention—and is now kicking away the ladder before the rest of the world can climb it.
Ha-Joon Chang is the economist who reads receipts. For decades, the development consensus has told poorer nations to open their markets, privatize their enterprises, and trust the invisible hand—advice that happens to be the opposite of what the nations dispensing it actually did. Chang's signal achievement in
Kicking Away the Ladder was to document, case by case, that Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and South Korea all climbed to industrial dominance on the back of tariffs, subsidies, state banks, and
infant industry protection—and then, once secure at the top, preached the virtues of the free market to everyone still on the ground. The diagnosis cuts directly into the AI transition: the nations that now dominate large language models built their technological base through the same public investments and strategic interventions they are using
to shape AI development, while the discourse around AI promotes a myth of garage-born private genius that obscures how thoroughly the
free market fairy tale serves