Edible Economics - When You're Hungry, but You're an Economic Professor...

Title: Edible Economics
Author: Ha-Joon Chang
Genre: Business & Economics
Publisher: Penguin Press
Release Date: 28/09/2023

RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK Economic thinking – about globalisation, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation and much more – in its most digestible form For decades, a single free market philosophy has dominated global economics. But this is bland and unhealthy – like British food in the 1980s, when bestselling author and economist Ha-Joon Chang first arrived in the UK from South Korea. Just as eating a wide range of cuisines contributes to a more interesting and balanced diet, so too is it essential we listen to a variety of economic perspectives. In Edible Economics, Chang makes challenging economic ideas more palatable by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world. He uses histories behind familiar food items – where they come from, how they are cooked and consumed, what they mean to different cultures – to explore economic theory. For Chang, chocolate is a life-long addiction, but more exciting are the insights it offers into post-industrial knowledge economies; and while okra makes Southern gumbo heart-meltingly smooth, it also speaks of capitalism’s entangled relationship with freedom and unfreedom. Explaining everything from the hidden cost of care work to the misleading language of the free market as he cooks dishes like anchovy and egg toast, Gambas al Ajillo and Korean dotori mook, Ha-Joon Chang serves up an easy-to-digest feast of bold ideas. Myth-busting, witty and thought-provoking, Edible Economics shows that getting to grips with the economy is like learning a recipe: if we understand it, we can change it – and, with it, the world.

The first culture shock you will experience as a foreigner is the food. Sometimes you feel that the food is bland, or sometimes you will find the food is way over your spice limit. Such exquisite experience may trigger a ‘hangry’ economist to write Edible Economics.

Prof. Ha-Joon Chang also wrote several books on economics using catchy titles such as Kicking Away the Ladder – Development Strategy in Historical Perspective and 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Judging based on Edible Economics and several pages of Kicking Away the Ladder, he is focussing on development economics, especially around the topics of trade and industrialization.

In the introduction, he mentioned that the purpose of writing this book is to ‘serve’ readers with different tastes in economic thoughts. Why should we bother about economics? He gave us a nearly three-page explanation of how economics will shape and impact our daily lives, whether it has something to do with wages, taxes, interest rates, labor rights, or the ways we sustain our living as a society.

He mixed and ‘cooked’ those topics and tried to represent them using different cooking ingredients, from garlic to chili as well as Coca-Cola to chocolate.

He touched on many economic themes especially related to the ways a country might develop or industrialized. He argued (I guessed most of the arguments traced back to Kicking Away the Ladder) that the developed countries used several ways to gain advantages in trade and industry such as employing protectionist measures, technological improvement, and patent system.

In other words, contrary to the popular images of free trade and individualist entrepreneurs, these successes stemmed from timely government intervention and technological capabilities to overcome natural limits.

He touched upon several pertinent issues related to development such as inequality, the value of care work as well as climate change. He even ‘abandoned’ his original story about lime and the Royal Navy to deliberately explain the nitty gritty technologies related to climate change such as solar, biofuel, climate change adaptation for water resources, and agriculture.

Returning to how the Royal Navy equipped their sailors with lime juice to cure scurvy, he advocates collective action across multiple layers of governance and sectors to address the challenge of climate change.

As a beginner and non-economist, I was amazed with the way he narrates economic thoughts using these ingredient, to certain extent describe special delicacies of the countries. However as for somebody who seeks to the basic understanding on economics, Edible Economics might give you ~~economic~~ food coma.