The Amnesia of the Advantaged

The amnesia of the advantaged is Chang's diagnosis of the systematic forgetting through which wealthy nations erase the memory of how they actually became wealthy. The amnesia is not passive memory loss but an active, functional, ideologically productive operation. It serves to legitimize the current distributional order by presenting wealth as the natural reward for superior policy choices rather than as the consequence of historical interventions that the wealthy nations now prohibit for others. The amnesia operates through professional economic education, through international institutions, through media coverage that celebrates entrepreneurial genius and ignores institutional foundations, and through the simple human tendency to attribute success to virtue rather than circumstance. Applied to the AI age, the amnesia takes the form of the Silicon Valley garage mythology — the story that brilliant founders created the AI revolution through pure ingenuity, with no acknowledgment of the publicly funded internet, algorithms, semiconductor supply chains, and university systems on which the