Ha-Joon Chang seems to be gaining lots of popularity by advocating protectionism for developing nations. Has anyone seen any mainstream or Austrian responses of his work?
A summary of his work can be found here.
A radio discussion with Chang and Tyler Cowen can be found here.
I would really appreciate thoughtful comments on this guy’s work.
i havent found any thorough indepth rebuttals.
but then i realised the good news.
austrian economists have written responses to protectionist arguments down the ages. As far as i understand chang doesnt seem to to have any original ideas, he only benefits from being a writer in the current period, so he has more history to selectively pick and choose facts from to state the old beloved protectionist case.So basically any austrian economist you find writing on protectionism from bastiat to rothbard should stand you in good stead, n’est pas?
Murphy has some articles which mention him. I’ve emailed him before and he is not impressed by this guy.
-Jon
If he advocates protectionism for developing countries, then really to rebut him (if that’s what you want) is merely to rebut protectionism, which is child’s play of showing that it harms the consumers in various ways by eliminating their freedom of choice. No point in even talking about him in particular.
Wikipedia says:
Concerning “deregulation” and “privatisation”, we know how these terms are often misused to describe corporate-government alliances aggressing against local property owners and homesteaders to further the profits of those multi-nationals. This will obviously be a drag on national GDP, while GDP itself is a very questionable measuring method as we all know. Several deceptive words and suspect techniques are being mixed together here, so judging the merit of Mr. Chang’s work on deregulation and privatisation would be hard to do at the moment.
“Anti-inflationary policies” also tend to produce, short-term, less GDP growth than pumping government money into the economy, but apparently Mr. Chang ignores the long-term economic and social consequences of doing so. At worst, he just picked some suitable statistics out of arbitrary time frames and “proved” that inflationary policies “are good”, that is, increase GDP.
It’d be neat to have someone who is familiar with Chang’s work. Judging from what Wikipedia offers me, he seems to offer no substantial critique against free markets, but has much rather engaged in data mining …
I have read his book and as far as getting facts right OR at least coming off as scholarly, Karl Marx does a better job. He offers no economic analysis at all in his book but he uses plenty of historical events taken out of context and he relies on analogies more than statistical information. For instance he says free trade is like allowing the girls team to play against the boys team in football or something to that effect.
The interesting thing about his work is he does not deny that free trade has positive short term effects but claims that in the long run it does not allow developing countries to create a diverse enough of a national economy to allow it to compete on an international scale. And he states this with absolutely nothing to back his argument. He points to protectionism in United States History but completely ignores the fact that the U.S became wealthy by allowing massive amounts of European investments and ownership within the country and that the super protectionism came much later in it’s history.
I have one of his students as a teacher/lecturer during this semester in Buenos Aires and it’s really pitiful to seem him worship Ha-Joon Chang and always stating his views on every issue. Lucky for him I’m rather playing chess than pointing out all his flawed arguments.
Which articles would those be?
Just search for his name alongside Ha-Joon Chang’s on the Mises website.
-Jon