the whole community is bound in common destiny... It always has been, but... we now feel it more accurately, and there will be demands... for... greater respect, even for marginalized groups [etc.]... That will create further pressure towards... more emphasis on universal human rights [etc]... However, whether that actually gets translated into laws and international conventions... [I]t's going to be a long struggle, but... to be... forthright... humanitarian progresses have seen many setbacks recently... Trump, Bolsanero, Brexit [etc.]... but... 200 years ago a lot of people... thought it was perfectly okay to buy and sell people... 100 years ago Britain and many other countries put women in prison for asking to vote, and only 78 years ago the founding fathers of today's developing nations, Nkrumah, Kenyatta... these people were all hunted down by the British and the French as terrorists, 40 years ago Margaret Thatcher famously said that anyone who thinks there will be a black majority to rule in South Africa ever, is living in a cloud cuckoo land... but all of these things were achieved, not by luck, but because people organized and fought for them, and... in the long run this crisis might be an occasion for those movements to be more... galvanized... become more international... and have greater chance at success." - Meaning and context.">

[N]ow we know that the whole community is bound in common destiny... It always has been, but... we now feel it more accurately, and there will be demands... for... greater respect, even for marginalized groups [etc.]... That will create further pressure towards... more emphasis on universal human rights [etc]... However, whether that actually gets translated into laws and international conventions... [I]t's going to be a long struggle, but... to be... forthright... humanitarian progresses have seen many setbacks recently... Trump, Bolsanero, Brexit [etc.]... but... 200 years ago a lot of people... thought it was perfectly okay to buy and sell people... 100 years ago Britain and many other countries put women in prison for asking to vote, and only 78 years ago the founding fathers of today's developing nations, Nkrumah, Kenyatta... these people were all hunted down by the British and the French as terrorists, 40 years ago Margaret Thatcher famously said that anyone who thinks there will be a black majority to rule in South Africa ever, is living in a cloud cuckoo land... but all of these things were achieved, not by luck, but because people organized and fought for them, and... in the long run this crisis might be an occasion for those movements to be more... galvanized... become more international... and have greater chance at success.

— Ha-Joon Chang

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "[N]ow we know that the whole community is bound in common destiny... It always has been, but... we now feel it more accurately, and there will be demands... for... greater respect, even for marginalized groups [etc.]... That will create further pressure towards... more emphasis on universal human rights [etc]... However, whether that actually gets translated into laws and international conventions... [I]t's going to be a long struggle, but... to be... forthright... humanitarian progresses have seen many setbacks recently... Trump, Bolsanero, Brexit [etc.]... but... 200 years ago a lot of people... thought it was perfectly okay to buy and sell people... 100 years ago Britain and many other countries put women in prison for asking to vote, and only 78 years ago the founding fathers of today's developing nations, Nkrumah, Kenyatta... these people were all hunted down by the British and the French as terrorists, 40 years ago Margaret Thatcher famously said that anyone who thinks there will be a black majority to rule in South Africa ever, is living in a cloud cuckoo land... but all of these things were achieved, not by luck, but because people organized and fought for them, and... in the long run this crisis might be an occasion for those movements to be more... galvanized... become more international... and have greater chance at success." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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.