Review - 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
Capitalism is a lot like a game. There are winners, losers and, at least some of the time, how well you play determines the outcome. There's a lot of fierce competition for power, resources and money. The distribution of winners in a capitalist society often forms something of a bell curve, with most of the population falling somewhere in the middle. On each tail end, there's a few people who have lost pretty badly - and the few who've hit the top.
Capitalism is a lot like a game - and like any game, it can be rigged.
Whether it's because the people who make the rules have given themselves an unfair advantage, have designed the rules specifically around their strengths, or keep changing the nature of the game to suit the needs of the present, it doesn't take a lengthy case to point out the inequity in today's capitalist game. The rules really are designed to benefit those who have power, and promotional schemes to reach those heights are usually just that: schemes. And I'm not just talking about the fact that most good jobs out there seem to go to somebody's friends's friend (rigged openings happen way more than you might think). I'm talking about the rules inherent to how the game is actually set up.
Ha-Joon Chang offers in his latest effort, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Main Thesis / Main Idea:
Capitalism operates under a set of false pretensions about human nature and the nature of "free" markets.
Ideas Addressed:
--Can there ever really be a free market?
--Are the elite systematically hiding anything about the nature of capitalism?
--Is it true that making the rich richer will make us all richer?
When it comes to things Chang knows about, his writing style is top-notch.
Ideas are presented along with their most common rebuttals - with a sound counter-argument to those rebuttals following immediately after. Excellent nonfiction format.
Most factual points are not sourced.
Some of these 23 Things are filler.
Does anyone sincerely believe in free-market economics since the bank bailouts?
So I'll note this up front: Chang's book is not an incendiary indictment of capitalistic fraud, nor is it a specifically damning account of particular organizations/people telling particular lies. But at least some of Chang's 23 Things
Admittedly, several of Chang's points are just filler. I mean, when one point is that despite what "they" have told you, the internet has not revolutionized commerse more than anything ever. First, I don't hear anyone making that claim....because it's quite obvious that innovations like the telegraph and widespread adoption of household electricity were bigger game-changers. Second, why would it matter if they did? It's complete filler to pontificate about a straw-man argument that nobody's making which wouldn't even hold much water if they were.
However, some of Chang's items deserve entire books of their own. Like Thing#1: There is no such thing as a free market. There's a myriad of reasons why markets are not (and can not) be entirely free with supplementary reasons of why groups of individuals may or may not want them to be. But Chang's book is structured in an easy-to-read way in that each section opens with the common establishment-view of the issue and a contrasting view of what the truth actually is immediately thereafter.
For example, how many times have you heard that the markets need to be free to yield the most economic growth? When the government interferes with regulations and dictates how the market operates, they claim, resources cannot flow with the utmost efficiency. Government intervention is simply an exercise in trying to roadblock operations from their normal flow, where monetary Darwinism cannot flourish. It's claimed that if people cannot seek out profit wherever they want to, the motivation to invest and innovate is lost.
That's what they tell you about free markets. What they don't tell you, according to Chang, is that there is no such thing as a free market. There are always regulations and if we see a market as free, it's only because we take those regulations for granted. And that's where the rigging of the game comes in.