What is Wrong with the “Official History of Capitalism
07/03/12
Bloc 3
In this document named “What is Wrong with the “Official History of Capitalism”? the author named Ha-Joon CHANG describes how today’s developed countries deliberately mislead developing countries in their road to development preventing them from taking a way that themselves took few decades ago.
Moreover, the author shows that, contrary to popular myth, the early development of both Britain and the United States depended on protective tariffs.
So we can wonder why is this history so widely ignored?
At first sight, the main information is that if a person or a country wants to succeed in economy, it has to know the historical part of it; it has to take in count every historical information that led to success in the past years, in order to follow the same steps.
As a matter of fact, nowadays, poor countries that try to grow look for the perfect recipe in order to do that, and instead of analyzing the recipe used in the past, they apply what developed countries advise (even force) them to do. This is the wrong solution to adopt, since these poor countries think that developed countries know better than them because they’ve been there, they let them do what they want and get trapped by “The official history of capitalism”.
For that matter, this official history of capitalism shows how free-trade, free-market policies led countries like Great Britain or USA to success and wealth. However, the reality is totally different; Great Britain for example, which is supposed to be the pioneer of free-market system, used very heavy interventionist and protectionist policies in the nineteenth century, it protected its industries in order to grow, this is where this official history of capitalism goes wrong, it only tells one part of the history. The only real period of success of free trade took place between 1860 and 1880; otherwise these countries (except Netherlands and Switzerland, which have good excuses) always used protectionism to grow.
Bloc 3
In this document named “What is Wrong with the “Official History of Capitalism”? the author named Ha-Joon CHANG describes how today’s developed countries deliberately mislead developing countries in their road to development preventing them from taking a way that themselves took few decades ago.
Moreover, the author shows that, contrary to popular myth, the early development of both Britain and the United States depended on protective tariffs.
So we can wonder why is this history so widely ignored?
At first sight, the main information is that if a person or a country wants to succeed in economy, it has to know the historical part of it; it has to take in count every historical information that led to success in the past years, in order to follow the same steps.
As a matter of fact, nowadays, poor countries that try to grow look for the perfect recipe in order to do that, and instead of analyzing the recipe used in the past, they apply what developed countries advise (even force) them to do. This is the wrong solution to adopt, since these poor countries think that developed countries know better than them because they’ve been there, they let them do what they want and get trapped by “The official history of capitalism”.
For that matter, this official history of capitalism shows how free-trade, free-market policies led countries like Great Britain or USA to success and wealth. However, the reality is totally different; Great Britain for example, which is supposed to be the pioneer of free-market system, used very heavy interventionist and protectionist policies in the nineteenth century, it protected its industries in order to grow, this is where this official history of capitalism goes wrong, it only tells one part of the history. The only real period of success of free trade took place between 1860 and 1880; otherwise these countries (except Netherlands and Switzerland, which have good excuses) always used protectionism to grow.