People have strong opinions on all sorts of things – gay marriage, Iraq, abortion, global warming – without having any qualifications to make informed judgments. I don’t have a degree in international relations but I have a view on Afghanistan. How come everyone thinks that economics is too difficult, too technical? People make strong judgments on the basis of having some basic knowledge about international politics or some climate science, they are not making this judgment based on sophisticated expert knowledge, and that’s all I’m asking when it comes to economic matters as well. Unfortunately we economists have been very successful in convincing people that what we do is very … Continue reading Ha-Joon Chang