we have to rethink the production system, the global supply chain, partly because of this pandemic but... no one thinks that this will be the only disease that is going to hit human society. A lot of us agree that increasing acceleration of climate change will create many other crises... extreme weather events and so on... but who knows what other crises are in store, so we need to rebuild the system to have more... resilience and robustness... Just think about airplanes, oil tankers... they can produce disastrous outcomes if something doesn't work. All these systems, including... electricity... have ways to absorb, isolate shocks and quickly bring backups [etc.]... and the economy will also have to be redesigned in that kind of way." - Meaning and context.">

Finally we have to rethink the production system, the global supply chain, partly because of this pandemic but... no one thinks that this will be the only disease that is going to hit human society. A lot of us agree that increasing acceleration of climate change will create many other crises... extreme weather events and so on... but who knows what other crises are in store, so we need to rebuild the system to have more... resilience and robustness... Just think about airplanes, oil tankers... they can produce disastrous outcomes if something doesn't work. All these systems, including... electricity... have ways to absorb, isolate shocks and quickly bring backups [etc.]... and the economy will also have to be redesigned in that kind of way.

— Ha-Joon Chang

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Finally we have to rethink the production system, the global supply chain, partly because of this pandemic but... no one thinks that this will be the only disease that is going to hit human society. A lot of us agree that increasing acceleration of climate change will create many other crises... extreme weather events and so on... but who knows what other crises are in store, so we need to rebuild the system to have more... resilience and robustness... Just think about airplanes, oil tankers... they can produce disastrous outcomes if something doesn't work. All these systems, including... electricity... have ways to absorb, isolate shocks and quickly bring backups [etc.]... and the economy will also have to be redesigned in that kind of way." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Ha-Joon Chang

About Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang (Hangul: 장하준; hanja: 張夏准; born 7 October 1963) is a South Korean institutional economist specialising in development economics. Currently a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge, Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, most notably Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002). In 2013 Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.