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In this area, Chang makes another essential contribution, a destruction of the popular myth that culture is a determining factor in whether a nation’s economy succeeds or not. As he notes, one of the standard arguments of the bad Samaritans is that the East Asian economies have prospered, not because of massive government investment in national industries and the protection of them from the rich countries by preventing rich countries from dumping cheap goods on their developing domestic markets, but because Asian people are ‘culturally’ predisposed towards hard work and frugality. Chang points out that, not too long ago, in the late-nineteenth century, the British and the French said the Germans were an inherently lazy and irresponsible people and that, just a few decades past, this same tale was being told about the Japanese and the Koreans – that they had yet to develop strong national economies because of a built-in aversion to foreign ideas and technological innovations. Of course, today the idea is the exact opposite, that the Germans and the Japanese and the Koreans are the embodiment of capitalist work discipline and that this largely explains their tremendous economic success.

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In chapters one and two, Chang reminds the rich countries of where exactly they came from. For example, in 1791, Alexander Hamilton, the US’s first treasury secretary, imposed what he called the policy of ‘infant industry’ protection; as a result, by 1820 US tariffs on imported goods reached 40 per cent. Likewise,several decades earlier, the head of economic policy in Britain, Robert Walpole, had put in place the Navigation Act, which required that all trade with Britain should be conducted on British ships. Chang documents that, during this period, Britain protected its industries a lot more heavily than did France, ‘the supposed counterpoint to its free-trade, free-market system’.

Yet, less than a century later, Britain was preaching free trade to less advanced countries like Germany and the US, which prompted the leading German economist of the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich List, to coin the phrase ‘kicking away the ladder’ – one of the central terms of Chang’s study. List saw Britain’s ‘expert’ policy prescriptions for the fledgling German and US economies as a transparent attempt by Britain to permanently cripple them while it still had the chance. But, like Japan and Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans and the Germans in the mid-nineteenth century paid no mind to these rich British bad Samaritans. Their eventual rise to the top of the global economic ladder was due entirely to following the opposite course: robust government investment in heavy industries, imposing very high tariffs on imported goods, tight regulation of product standards, the development of state-owned financial and transportation infrastructures and running not infrequently very large budget deficits in order to rapidly expand certain vital consumer markets.

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