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23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Chang's 2010 systematic dismantling of the most cherished myths of mainstream economics — twenty-three propositions presented as common sense and demonstrated, against historical evidence, to be ideologically convenient fictions.
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, published in 2010, is Chang's most accessible and widely read work — a chapter-by-chapter dismantling of twenty-three propositions that mainstream economics presents as common sense and that historical evidence reveals as ideologically convenient fictions. The targeted propositions include: there is no such thing as a free market; the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet; we do not live in a post-industrial age; making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer; companies should not be run in the interest of their owners; we are not smart
enough to leave things to the market. Each chapter combines historical evidence, comparative analysis across countries, and accessible argument to demonstrate that the proposition mainstream economics treats as obvious is, on examination, either false or much more contestable than the orthodoxy admits. The book's broad readership has made it one of the most influential popular economics works of the past