Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World

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Anyway, you won't only learn about economics, you'll get plenty of neat historical facts you didn't know about, too. The food stories are not just a pretext for a dry lecture, they are fascinating and engaging in themselves - so much engaging that you won’t realize when they morph into the economic ones. Myth-busting, witty, and thought-provoking, Edible Economics serves up a feast of bold ideas about globalization, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation, and why carrots need not be orange. But some of them work much better than others: the train of thought from spices to shareholder value runs along quite smoothly, but elsewhere the narrative shifts from chicken to the welfare system with all the elegance of a Eurovision key-change. This book is myth-busting, witty, and thought-provoking, Edible Economics serves up a feast of bold ideas about globalization, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation, and why carrots need not be orange.

Government services: the IRS has ancient technology as do air traffic controllers - all thanks to our government leaders. In chapters with titles such as Noodle and Banana, Ha-Joon Chang sketches out the story of his home country’s rise. Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to review Edible Economics in exchange for an honest review. Well, he already told us that we have limited “mental capacity;” so he gets big brother to”help” us.

The author states that they want to provide different perspectives and let the reader decide, but I found that to be very disingenuous. Ideal para los interesados en economía y gastronomía, dos grandes pasiones del autor, como lo deja claramente demostrado. Ha-Joon Chang offers some unique perspectives on various economic theories, often presenting multiple differing opinions in the same chapter.

This book reminded me why Southeast Asian cuisine is the one ethnic food group I most want to try, and reassured me in my obstinately experimental tastes. That said, an interesting and creative approach to get more people interested and understand how economics work at a global scale. This is effectively a collection of blog posts in which a single type of food is extraordinarily loosely tied to a vague topic in economics. Each chapter is a bit of a stand alone essay of a food item and then the discussion morphs into something economic.kg can or a 300 g can of anchovies in olive oil on a given run to the supermarket, I appreciated how Mr Chang used commonly eaten and popular foodstuff across the world to explain economic theories, political-economic systems, processes, and even an economist's overview of world history from the recent past to the present.

While I did find some of Chang’s opinions to be distinctly British — though born and raised in South Korea, Ha-Joon Chang attended university and now teaches in the UK — it was still easy to remind myself that this is a book of opinions as much as it is a book of fact. Often, it goes a bit off-tangent from the beginning of chapters and you end up in an entirely different plane. The blend of food and economics was sometimes good and sometimes non-existant and really just an interesting type of food and.His books include Economics: The User's Guide, Bad Samaritans and 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which was an international no. Chang’s preferred growth model, once unorthodox, is close to being an “anti-Washington” consensus these days, and like all such consensuses, has weaknesses. But he is also right when he adds: “my economic stories are going to be rewards in themselves because I have made them tastier than the usual by making them more varied in kind and more complex in flavour”.

Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. So overall, I did enjoy the book, but think the execution was a bit more chaotic than it needed to be. Being a history reader, I knew about events like those told in the Anchovy chapter, the Banana chapter, etc.Ha-Joon Chang is a Professor Economics at SOAS University of London, and is one of the world’s leading economists. I honestly never thought I would enjoy a book on economics, but I found myself fascinated the whole way through. 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? 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. Taking the example of the humble anchovy, he tells us how the raw materials based economies were ruined by the surge of synthetic substitutes, as happened to guano, rubber, and dyes, on which economies such as Peru's, Brazil's and Guatemala's were dependent on to prosper, and how this can happen again (and why).