Author: Muhammad Fakhruddin

  • Edible Economics – When You’re Hungry, but You’re an Economic Professor…

    Edible Economics Book Cover Edible Economics
    Ha-Joon Chang
    Business & Economics
    Penguin Press
    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.

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  • 3 Hal dari 2024

    1. Semakin banyak ‘pesta buku’ dan pemain baharu dalam arena buku. Banyak yang mengisi tema-tema baru walaupun disebut sebagai ‘healing’. ‘Healing’ bukanlah baharu tetapi pembawaan nuansa generasi Z. Generasi lain pun ikut ‘healing’ dengan cara dan minat masing-masing. Setiap daya yang menggerak akan ada daya yang merintang menurut ilmu fizik, dan pengalaman hidup secara umumnya.

    2. Saya semakin lambat membaca, dan Imran Rasid suruh kurangkan membaca! Di persimpangan ini terasa mahu menelaah ke daerah jahil saya, ekonomi. Walaupun pernah cuba membaca almarhum Ungku Aziz dan Dr. Khalid, saya sedar ada banyak yang saya tak tahu, misalnya apakah sesuatu itu punya nilai/ value seperti kripto dan karbon?

    3. Mungkin yang saya baca tidak semestinya buku-buku umum yang dijual di kedai. Ada laporan badan antarabangsa yang perlu dicerakin intinya (biasanya ada dalam Executive Summary), atau artikel-artikel jurnal dan jargon-jargon yang perlu saya hadami.

  • Percikan dari Membakar Sastera

    Membakar Sastera
    A. Muziru Idham
    Legasi Oakheart
    2022
    Paperback
    112

    When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience

    George Orwell (Why I Write)

    Barangkali mengambil inspirasi daripada George Orwell juga, Membakar Sastera dimulakan dengan perihal pengarang dan kepengarangan. Sekiranya Orwell terus-terang cuba mengadun hal-hal estetika dengan isu-isu politikal, Muziru pula melontar persoalan kesunyian serta kejujuran karya-karya yang dicoret oleh para pengarang.

    Sejauh mana hasil karya seseorang dapat dipastikan menjadi cerminan diri dan kehendak nurani pengarangnya? Persoalan berat tetapi menarik ini cuba dirungkai dalam satu esei ringkas tanpa mendatangkan contoh atau perbandingan. Catatan Membakar Sastera itu menjadi mukadimah kepada persoalan dasar dalam esei-esei berikutnya yang menyentuh soal kayu ukur dan penilaian karya-karya sastera.

    Agak jelas soal penilaian dan kayu ukur sastera ini dituju kepada Gagasan Persuratan Baru (GPB) janaan Mohd. Affandi Hassan, dan tanpa berselindung menggelarnya sebagai ‘algojo yang cemerlang’. ‘Algojo’ dalam erti kata pengkritik yang istiqamah dalam dunia sastera/persuratan Malaysia dan rangka penilaian Anugerah Sastera Negara yang menobatkan Sasterawan Negara.

    Saya melihat bahawa persoalan kayu ukur ini perlu disorot dari pelbagai faktor, dan berkait dengan sejarah perkembangan ‘sastera’ itu sendiri. Ada yang mengetengahkan teori pengarang atau karya utama. Ada juga yang membuat sorotan berdasarkan tempoh perkembangan.

    Mungkin akan muncul pengkritik-pengkritik baharu yang mendorong terobosan baharu dalam dunia sastera kita.