I ...don't understand how, in the UK... US... Brazil, people think it is OK to have hundreds of people die every day, if not thousands. ...In South Korea ...despite it being one of the countries that got hit the earliest, the death toll is still below 300 ...In the UK ...there are days when that number of people die in a day... So it has exposed the total failure of this laissez-faire approach, when it comes to issues like this. Also, what countries have done to deal with this crisis... in... at least the short to medium term, if not the long term, have... destroyed this neoliberal... article of faith that the best thing that the government can do is to provide law and order and invest in the social infrastructure, and maybe a bit of basic education..." - Meaning and context.">

When these numbers keep climbing they just become statistics, but I ...don't understand how, in the UK... US... Brazil, people think it is OK to have hundreds of people die every day, if not thousands. ...In South Korea ...despite it being one of the countries that got hit the earliest, the death toll is still below 300 ...In the UK ...there are days when that number of people die in a day... So it has exposed the total failure of this laissez-faire approach, when it comes to issues like this. Also, what countries have done to deal with this crisis... in... at least the short to medium term, if not the long term, have... destroyed this neoliberal... article of faith that the best thing that the government can do is to provide law and order and invest in the social infrastructure, and maybe a bit of basic education...

— Ha-Joon Chang

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "When these numbers keep climbing they just become statistics, but I ...don't understand how, in the UK... US... Brazil, people think it is OK to have hundreds of people die every day, if not thousands. ...In South Korea ...despite it being one of the countries that got hit the earliest, the death toll is still below 300 ...In the UK ...there are days when that number of people die in a day... So it has exposed the total failure of this laissez-faire approach, when it comes to issues like this. Also, what countries have done to deal with this crisis... in... at least the short to medium term, if not the long term, have... destroyed this neoliberal... article of faith that the best thing that the government can do is to provide law and order and invest in the social infrastructure, and maybe a bit of basic education..." 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.