QuoteProject
People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
Ha-Joon Chang
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

In impoverished nations, individuals must be resourceful and innovative to meet their basic needs.

This quote highlights the necessity for entrepreneurship in low-income countries, where survival often depends on the ability to create opportunities, innovate, and make use of limited resources. People in these environments face numerous challenges, leading them to adopt entrepreneurial behaviors simply to secure food, shelter, and other essentials, demonstrating resilience and creativity in difficult circumstances.

Themes

EntrepreneurshipSurvivalInnovationPovertyResourcefulness

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about economic development strategies.

More from Ha-Joon Chang

The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth. Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.
Ha-Joon ChangRead
Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rick as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.
Ha-Joon ChangRead
Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
Ha-Joon ChangRead
The higher education system in these countries (US, Korea etc) has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, promoting the others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable.
Ha-Joon ChangRead
There is no such thing as a free market.
Ha-Joon ChangRead
[Good managers] know that people have 'good' sides and 'bad' sides and that the secret of good management is in magnifying the former and toning down the latter.
Ha-Joon ChangRead

Similar quotes

It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.
Friedrich August Von HayekRead
Building new roads and bridges creates jobs. Growing our exports creates jobs. Reforming our outdated tax system and our broken immigration system creates jobs.
Barack ObamaRead
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead
Unless you reduce the long-term spending burden, you cannot cut taxes in any lasting way, but can only shift the burden of taxes from the present to the future.
Peter George PetersonRead
The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.
Jeremy GranthamRead
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.

Quote by Ha-Joon Chang | QuoteProject