23 Things They Don’t Tell You About

This month one of my readers asked the question: “How could mental abuse have happened to me?”

She went on to say that she is a successful, professional woman – as if professional accomplishments ought to be sufficient to ward off abusers, in the same way that garlic and crosses apparently stop Dracula in his tracks. (And, yes, as cited before in this ezine, there is a strong sameness amid abusive men and Dracula in that both will bleed you dry, given half a chance.)

It happened to her, as it happens to so galore women, for numerous reasons, a good deal of of which I’ve outlined below. It happens chiefly because given the lack of readily available information, you only find out the hard way.

#1 ‘They’ never told you, because they didn’t know. It is the degree of widespread ignorance in our society when it comes to mental abuse that allows it to go on happening. Not only do they not know, but they don’t have an inkling that they don’t know.

So they think that their view of the world is true and precise and they perpetrate this view of the world in which if these things take place at all, they occur to poor sad humans who live very dissimilar lives to their own – and in some manner fetch it on themselves by belonging to that group.

Isn’t it fantasti how they only see the things that fit with their beliefs? Sadly, women do that one too, which is why it takes us a while to recognise that our hero is mentally abusive and then get out…

#2 Mental abuse is a great leveller. Whether you live in a palace or a slum you are evenly susceptible. I may think of all kinds of high profile, hugely talented, successful women whose personal life has been ravaged by mental abuse, and often physical domestic violence also.

We may use our achievements, or our looks, or anything else we choose to recompense for a sense of worthlessness, but the truth is it is no protection. It surely isn’t an effective radar scheme that will give innovative warning of potential aggressors entering our orbit.

#3 You’re not alone. Mental abuse happens to big numbers of women. About 1 in 4 actually, at galore point in their life. But a lot either stay in denial or feel so penitent they won’t in an open way confess to it.

#4 Love may well not be enough – exceptionally when it is either one sided (your side) or affiliated with a patchy, or non-existent regard for your well being (his side).

You are entitled to love someone notwithstanding vile their behaviour towards you. It doesn’t mean you ought to tolerate the behaviour. And you would likewise be advised to write down a list of incisively what it is that you love with regards to them.

#5 Nasty behaviours are not blips or aberrations. They are clear indications of a nasty side to his temperament. Yes, possibly we have all been there attempting to work out, approximately, what percentage of a collaborator is nasty and what percentage is nice. But does this genuinely make sense? When we do this, we are already to a considerable degree into denial and likely to be wildly inaccurate.

It puts me in mind of a client of mine who came to me years ago in tears because she had to re-home a much loved Alsatian. The dog had twice moved to attack her young son for no reason. She saw the pattern and wasn’t prepared to take any more chances.

Women, on average, will endure 35 assaults by their collaborator before they leave. Sure, it is much harder for a woman to leave a violent collaborator than it is to re-home a dog, but the other side of the coin is the astonishing degree to which women will deny or minimise the threats to their health and safety.

If in the firstborn flush of romance he is ‘different – ie nicer – with you than he is with other people, know that with familiarity you will become ‘other people’ and be treated accordingly.

#6 Relationships don’t have to be like a poorly organised bungee jump. If you commit to a kinship hoping it will turn out alright, but not knowing how or why it should, it most probably won’t. “Forever” is a difficult percentage of a kinship to get right. It needs severe consideration.

#7 You are not Florence Nightingale. You are looking for a life collaborator and an equal, not a poor wounded soldier. Your life does not have to be the Crimea. Equally, there is no point in being either Mother Teresa or Wendy. Self-sacrifice and/or Peter Pan may be very draining over the longer term.

#8 The more distinctly you visualise the kind of kinship and collaborator you veritably want, the closer you are likely to get to achieving it.

#9 Compromise snowballs. If you are prepared to settle for less, you will surely get it. Increasingly so. Bad relationships have their own momentum. You need to factor that into how you think the kinship will be 1, 5 and 10 years down the line.

#10 Whatever has happened to you and whatsoever he has said to you, it doesn’t make you a fool, or worthless. You’re just a woman who has stayed too long – whether that is months, years or decades.

What’s happened, has happened. What’s crucial is that you may move forward into a fulfilling, joyful future. And you may use that learning curve to protect yourself, your family and friends in the future. While I believe that not a single soul will have to have to go through it, I believe that all of us who have been there may work to expose the blindness and ignorance that allows mental abuse to thrive.

(C) 2006 Annie Kaszina

23 Things They Dont Tell You About

From Publishers WeeklyChang (Bad Samaritans) takes on the “free-market ideologues,” the stentorian voices in economic thought and, in his analysis, the engineers of the recent financial catastrophe. Free market orthodoxy has inserted it is tenterhooks into almost each economy in the world–over the past three decades, most countries have privatized state-owned industrial and financial firms, deregulated finance and industry, liberalized international trade and investments, and scaled down income taxes and welfare payments. But these policies have unleashed bubbles and ever increasing income disparity. How may we dig ourselves out? By examining the a great deal of myths in the narrative of free-market liberalism, crucially that the name is itself a misnomer: there is not one thing “free” in regards to a market where wages are for the most part politically determined; that dandier macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable; and a more educated population itself won’t make a country richer. An advocate of big, active government and capitalism as distinct from a free market, Chang presents an enlightening précis of innovative economic thought–and all the places it’s gone wrong, urging us to act in order to completely rebuild the world economy: “This will some readers uncomfortable… it is time to get uncomfortable.” (Jan.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a section of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Most helpful client reviews

120 of 136 humans found the following review helpful.
Excellent introduction to economics
By William Podmore
Ha-Joon Chang, Reader in the Political Economy of Development at Cambridge University, has written a arousing and attention holding book on capitalism’s failings. He likewise wrote the brilliant Bad Samaritans. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says he is `probably the world’s most effective critic of globalisation’.

73 of 83 people found the following review helpful.
Popular anti-orthodoxy by Ha-Joon Chang
By M. A. Krul
Ha-Joon Chang, economist at Cambridge University, is a intimate author to a lot of in the ordinary public by now for his persistent and eloquent attempts (when writing) to combat the economic orthodoxy on assorted major policy points. In particular, he is known for his defense of protectionism as a means to promote economic growth and for his rejection of the idea that ‘free trade’ and ‘free markets’ lead to better outcomes than number of things from which only one can be chosen such as government dirigisme. In “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”, he attempts to make the lessons of heterodoxy intimate to as wide a public as possible, addressing 23 orthodox economic clichés that are often accepted by a skeptical usual public only because they seem to be supported by all in the economic field. In making the counterarguments accessible and in general known, Chang has done the English-speaking world a outstanding service.

The 23 things he discusses may be roughly clustered into a number of groups: he discusses the orthodoxies of free trade as versus protectionism, the orthodoxies of free markets as versus government intervention, the orthodoxies of wage policy (particularly the idea that wages are infallibly determined by person marginal productivity), the orthodoxy that inequality of income and outcome does not matter, and at long last the idea that financial managers and economists recognise best. On all of these points, he has very essential lessons to convey to policymakers, civil servants, and the popular public to show that these things ought to either be rejected out of hand or be taken with a big truckload of salt. Using the intensities of economic history, he accessibly shows in each of these cases how the cliché is either rebutted by the facts or itself an incoherent idea, or both.

That said, from time to time his critique does not go rather far enough, and this shows the limitations of Chang’s own economic theory standpoint. As he makes clear, the book itself is intended to criticize the orthodoxies of ‘free market’ capitalism, but not capitalism itself. As a result, his critique is not as powerful and does not convey as galore important standard lessons as it could. For example, altho he is rather right with regards to the relation amongst protectionism, government intervention, and growth, he does not criticize the conception of growth itself as the only goal in economic policy, nor does he point out the necessary fact that growth may in fact be bad for the median living ordinary if it causes the distribution of wealth to be more unequal. He also, because of his market economy predilections, vastly understates the success of planned economies historically, in spite of referring at one point of the book to Robert Allen’s magnificent exploration on Soviet industrialization policy. He also does not point out that the strong capitalist capitalist state he favors itself throughout history has tended to impede the development of more egalitarian outcomes and have a tendancy to be repressive of unions and collective action. Finally, he does not critique any of the assumptions of microeconomics, only macroeconomics.

Nonetheless, most of the 23 lessons are well taken and altho I have a heap of disagreements with a number of them, they are exceedingly well invented for public understanding and without doubt much closer to a real picture of how capitalist economies work than any of your intermediate macroecon textbooks. It is hence to be hoped that this book will have a wide audience.

60 of 69 persons found the following review helpful.
Excellent Data-Based Perspectives!
By Loyd E. Eskildson
The 2008 ‘Great Recession’ demands re-examination of prevailing economic thought – the dominant paradigm (post 1970′s conservative free-market capitalism) not only failed to predict the crisis, but also said it couldn’t occur in today’s free markets, thanks to Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’ Ha-Joon Chang provides that re-examination in his “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.” Turns out that the reason Adam Smith’s hand was not visible is that it wasn’t there. Chang, economics professor at the University of Cambridge, is no enemy of capitalism, altho he contends it is current conservative version must be made better. Conventional wisdom tells us that left alone, markets manufacture the most effective and just outcomes – ‘efficient’ because businesses and persons recognise best how to utilise their resources, and ‘just’ because they are rewarded according to their productivity. Following this advice, countries have deregulated businesses, scaled down taxes and welfare, and adopted free trade. The results, per Chang, has been the opposite of what was promised – slower growth and rising inequality, often times dissembled by rising credit elaboration and increased working hours. Alternatively, constructing Asian countries that grew fast did so following a dissimilar version of capitalism, altho to be reasonable China’s version to-date has likewise developed much more outstanding inequality. The following sums up a lot of of Chang’s points:

1)”There is no such thing as a free market” – we already have hygiene standards in restaurants, ban child labor, pollution, narcotics, bribery, and dangerous workplaces, require licenses for professions such as doctors, lawyers, and brokers, and limit immigration. In 2008, the U.S. used at least $700 billion of taxpayers’ cash to buy up toxic assets, justified by President Bush on the grounds that it was a necessary state intervention consistent with free-market capitalism. Chang’s conclusion – free-marketers contending that a sure regulation must not be introduced because it would restrict market freedom are merely expressing political opinions, not economic facts or laws.

2)”Companies ought to not be run in the interest of their owners.” Shareholders are the most mobile of corporate stakeholders, many times keeping ownership for but a fraction of a second (high-frequency syndication represents 70% of today’s trading). Shareholders prefer corporate schemes that maximize short-term profits and dividends, ordinarily at the cost of long-term investments. (This many times also includes added leverage and risk, and reliance on socializing risk thru ‘too huge to fail’ status, and relying on ‘the Greenspan put.’) Chang adds that corporate fixed liability, while a boon to capital accumulation and technical progress, when combined with professional managers rather of enterprisers owning a big chunk (eg. Ford, Edison, Carnegie) and public shares with littler voting rights (typically fixed to 10%), allows professional managing directors to maximize their own prestige by way of sales growth and prestige projects rather of maximizing profits. Another negative long-term outcome driven by stockholders is increased portion buybacks (less than 5% of profits until the early 1980s, 90% in 2007, and 280% in 2008) – one economist estimates that had GM not expended $20.4 billion on buybacks among 1986 and 2002 it could have prevented it is 2009 bankruptcy. Short-term stockholder perspectives have also brought large-scale layoffs from off-shoring. Governments of other countries give hope or courage to longer-term thinking by keeping huge shares in key endeavors (China Mobile, Renault, Volkswagen), supplying more outstanding worker representation (Germany’s supervisory boards), and cross-shareholding among friendly companies (Japan’s Toyota and it is suppliers).

7)”Free-market policies seldom make poor countries rich.” With a few exceptions, all of today’s rich countries, including Britain and the U.S., reached that status through protectionism, subsidies, and other policies that they and their IMF, WTO, and World Bank now advise manufacturing nations not to adopt. Free-market economists normally respond that the U.S. succeeded despite, not because of, protectionism. The problem with that comprehensible statement is the number of other nations paralleling the early growth scheme of the U.S. and Britain (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan), and the fact that apparent exclusions (Hong Kong, Switzerland, The Netherlands) did so by ignoring alien patents (a free-market ‘no-no’). Chang believes the ‘official historians’ of capitalism have been very successful re-writing it is history, akin to somebody attempting to ‘kick away the ladder’ with which they had climbed to the top. He also points out that formulating nations that stick to their Ricardian ‘comparative advantage,’ per the conservatives prescription, condemn themselves to their economic status quo.

9)”We do not live in a post-industrial age.” Most of the fall in manufacturing’s portion of total output is not due to a fall in the amount of fictitious goods, but due to the fall in their prices relative to those for services, caused by their more quickly productivity growth. A little portion of deindustrialization is due to outsourcing of a great deal of ‘manufacturing’ actions that employed to be provided in-house – eg. catering and cleaning. Those advising the newly formulating nations to skip developing and go directly to supplying services forget that a good deal of services principally serve manufacturing firms (finance, R&D, design), and that since services are harder to export, such an approach will create balance-of-payment problems. (Chang’s preceding points directly contradict David Ricardo’s law of comparative vantage – a rudimentary free market precept. Chang’s example of how Korea built Pohang Steel into a strong economic producer, in spite of missing out experienced managing directors and natural resources, is another.)

10)”The U.S. does not have the most eminent living standard in the world.” True, the intermediate U.S. citizen has more outstanding command over goods and services than his counterpart in almost any other country, but this is due to higher immigration, poorer employment conditions, and working longer hours for a great deal of vs. their alien counterparts. The U.S. also has poorer health indicators and worse crime statistics. We do have the world’s second most eminent income per capita – Luxemburg’s higher, but measured in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) the U.S. ranks eighth. (The U.S. doesn’t have the quickest growing economy either – China is prevised to pass the U.S. in PPP this coming decade.) Chang’s point here is that we will have to stop assuming the U.S. provides the best economic model. (This is already occurring – the World Bank’s chief economist, Justin Lin, comes from China.)

12)”Governments may pick winners.” Chang cites examples of how the Korean government built world-class manufacturers of steel (POSCO), shipbuilding (Hyundai), and electronics (LG), in spite of missing out raw materials or experience for those sectors. True, major government failures have occurred – Europe’s Concorde, Indonesia’s aircraft industry, Korea’s publicity of aluminum smelting, and Japan’s crusade to have Nissan take over Honda; industry, however, has also failed – eg. the AOL-Time Warner merger, and the Daimler-Chrysler merger. Austria, China, Finland, France, Japan, Norway, Singapore (in numerous other areas), and Taiwan have also done rather well with government-picked winners. Another problem is that business and national interests now and again clash – eg. American firms’ massive outsourcing has undermined the national interest of sustaining full employment. (However, dandier unbiased U.S. government involvement would be difficult due to the 10,000+ corporate lobbyists and billions in corporate venture donations – $500 million alone from huge oil in 2009-10.) Also interesting to Chang is how conservative free syndication bankers in the U.S. lined up for mammoth low-cost loans from the Federal Reserve at the beginning of the Great Recession. Government planning allows minimizing excess capacity, maximizing learning-curve economies and economies of scale and scope; operational performance is heightened by likewise forcing government-owned or supported firms into global competition. Government intervention (loans, tariffs, subsidies, prohibiting exports of necessitated raw materials, building infrastructure) are necessary for emergent economies to move into more sophisticated sectors.

13)”Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer.” ‘Trickle-down’ economics is based on the faith that the poor maximize current consumption, while the rich, left to themselves, largely invest. However, the years 1950-1973 saw the highest-ever growth rates in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in spite of increased taxation of the rich. Before the ‘Golden Age,’ per capita income grew at 1-1.5%/year; for the duration of the Golden Age it grew at 2-3% in the U.S. Since then, tax cuts for the rich and financial deregulation have permitted more outstanding paychecks for top managers and financiers, and amid 1979 and 2006 the top 0.1% increased their share of national income from 3.5% to 11.6%. The result – investment as a proportionality of national output has fallen in all rich economies and the pace at which the total economic pie grew decreased.

14)”U.S. managing directors are over-priced.” First, relative to their predecessors (about 10X those in the 1960s; now 300-400X the intermediate worker), in spite of the latter having run companies more successfully, in relative terms. Second, equated to counterparts in other rich countries – up to 20X. (Third, equated to counterparts in developing nations – eg. JPMorgan Chase, world’s 4th greatest bank, salaried it is CEO $19.6 million in 2008, vs. the CEO of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest, being remunerated $234,700.) American CEOs do not get punished for bad management either – rather receiving raises and restated stock options, or at least loan forgiveness and golden parachutes. (Collusion among CEO members of interlocking ‘rubber-stamp’ boards fed fixed data is one reason for exuberant U.S. CEO pay; lack of stock holder interest, thanks to being remunerated high and rising dividends, a short-term strategy, is another.) Chang asks, rhetorically, “If American CEOs are worth so much, how come their companies have been losing out to alien competitors?” (And why aren’t they laying out capital like their alien counterparts, rather of sitting on a lot of $2 trillion in current assets?)

17)”More education in itself is not going to make a country richer.” Increasing deindustrialization and automation have lowered noesis requirements for most jobs in rich countries. The East Asian miracle economies turned in their impressive early gains in spite of literacy rates of in regards to 50%, and Korean public schools had class sizes of 90; conversely, countries like the Philippines and Argentina did poorly in spite of having significantly better-educated populations, while Sub-Saharan Africa per capita income fell 0.3%/year from 1980-2004 in spite of literacy rates rising from 40% to 61%. Harvard economist Lant Pritchett analyzed selective information from 1960-87 and found very little proof supporting the view that increased education leads to higher economic growth. Most education isn’t even meant to raise productivity, and math/science courses are not applicable for most. Switzerland is one of the richest and most industrialized countries, but likewise has the lowest university enrollment in the rich world. (College education in the U.S. has already become a bubble – in regards to half our graduates take jobs not calling for such education.)

Chang’s recommendations include ending our “love affair with unrestrained, free-market capitalism and installing a better-regulated variety,” having government become more active in economic affairs, and making financial markets less attractive. (U.S. financial assets/GDP exceeded 900% by the early 2000s, averaged 4-12% return since deregulation – higher than most non-financial firms at amidst 2-5%, and divert attention from developing and it is potentially much more prominent employment. Methods of doing so include taxing market transactions, banning short-selling and derivatives, and limiting bank leverage.)

Bottom-Line: Chang’s one shortcoming is ignoring/understating the huge negative affect of huge trade deficits on the U.S. – this from time to time reorients his assessment of the affect of other factors. Overall, however, “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” provides a sorely necessitated approach to economic decision-making – using data rather than ideology. Readers will be left marveling why Chang or other Asians don’t win the Nobel prize in economics – it’s their economies that have been transforming the world for last 50 years, not the free-market conservative capitalist economies of the U.S. or Europe.

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