Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World

Product Information

The blend of food and economics was sometimes good and sometimes non-existant and really just an interesting type of food and. Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to review Edible Economics in exchange for an honest review. In chapters with titles such as Noodle and Banana, Ha-Joon Chang sketches out the story of his home country’s rise. His descriptions of the wheres and hows of the food items serve as a springboard for his explanations about the economics and both are equally entertaining. This is the same egomania that underlined Stalin and Mao’s collectivization drives that killed millions.

I honestly never thought I would enjoy a book on economics, but I found myself fascinated the whole way through. Essentially we got dinner and a movie where the dinner although quite interesting had nothing to do with the movie which was decent yet somewhat underwhelming. In my opinion, this book lacks depth - a facet which especially hurts the obvious agenda-driven nature of the writing.I found many of the brief lectures on various economic topics good but some were a tad basic/boring. Ha-Joon Chang uses food stories, knitting world history and personal stories together, to explain important themes in economics; often deconstructing popular economic myths that stil inform mainstream economics education and policymaking (including “post-industrialisation”, the “free market”, the importance of the care economy, misunderstandings of the welfare state, protectionism, innovation etc. It was a novel way to talk about some economics concepts which was frequently entertaining but it wasn't a perfect blend. As with a Church of England sermon, it’s easy to chuckle at the artless way in which the points are sometimes brought in, – “In a very real sense, isn’t the carrot rather like a patent system?

I'm very used to Europeans and Europe-based gurus (the author is South Korean, but he's made his career in the UK, so I'm counting him in) being awful at analysing South America, save the Spaniards and Portuguese because language and historical ties that continue make them closer and more in touch, but it never ceases to bother me how ill-informed their commentary can be sometimes. Very refreshing is not only his style, but also his Korean background - he offers an original, non-Western-centric point of view on food as well as on economics. Anyway, you won't only learn about economics, you'll get plenty of neat historical facts you didn't know about, too.Raczej tę książkę polecam dla młodych ludzi, zainteresowanych lub których chcemy zainteresować ekonomią, gospodarka światową, a nie dla tych którzy mają jako takie pojęcie o tych kwestiach. Ha-Joon Chang has been working hard at providing an alternative to neoliberalism for two decades now, ever since his book Kicking Away the Ladder pointed out that low taxes, free trade and deregulation simply wasn’t the way that most rich countries had developed.