I finished the book. I would classify it as social-democratic. Ha-Joon Chang in few places repeats popular stereotypes about USSR, but he is not radical in this, and admits that the economic miracle of south eastern Asia was inspired, among others, by works of Marx. Also, in one or two places he writes that “communism felt” what is obviously untrue. He is thus a little bit westernized.

Besides these drawbacks, he is very good at showing many many problems with so called “free market capitalism”. I would recommend this book for a liberal, who would be not open for Marx, to open her or his eyes to inherent problems with free market economies. This could be a bridge useful to convince it to ML later. For a ML reader, this book may be too basic and too obvious, but still it is well written and thus a pleasure to read.