The acclaimed Ha-Joon Chang is a voice of sanity-and wit-in this lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists have spun since the Age of Reagan. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism uses twenty-three short essays (a few great examples: “There Is No Such Thing as a Free Market,” “The Washing Machine Has Changed the World More than the Internet Has”) to equip readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works, and doesn’t, while offering a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.
Praise for 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism:
“A lively, accessible and provocative book.”-Sunday Times (UK )
“Chang, befitting his position as an economics professor at Cambridge University, is engagingly thoughtful and opinionated at a much lower decibel level. ‘The “truths” peddled by free-market ideologues are based on lazy assumptions and blinkered visions,’ he charges.”-Time
LATEST POSTS:
- The Comparator Test: Does Penn Apply the Same Standard?
- PragerU Salaries & Bonuses
- The David Pinsof Story
- Added Context to the Dennis Prager-Cedars Sinai Lawsuit
- The Criticism Was Right and It Did Nothing: Andrew Gelman, Seth Roberts, and the Limits of Being Correct
- What Andrew Gelman Doesn’t Write About
- Andrew Gelman: ‘Computer scientists today are like economists in the early 2000s and Freudian psychiatrists in the 1950s’
- Virtue Signaling and the Amy Wax case
- Revisiting Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
- The Great Delusion
- Why Do I Instinctively Dislike Erik Erikson?
- WSJ: The Uninvited Guest Who Crashed Our Family Vacation: My Mom’s AI Chatbot
- WEHT to Marc Weisblott?
- WEHT to Moxie aka Madison Slade?
- WEHT to Nicholas Polson’s Archive?
- Cohen Passes His Own Audit (V2)
- Andrew Gelman & the E-Personality
- ‘(1) “Do you think the culture of research has genuinely changed since the replication crisis became widely discussed, or has it mostly generated new compliance rituals around pre-registration and open data while leaving the underlying incentive structure intact?, (2) Regarding Columbia University, “is there a statistical or social scientific way of understanding how institutions lose the ability to accurately perceive their own situation?”’
- What a Public Audit Does (V4)
- Post: ‘Nathan Cofnas the Schlimazel’
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)
