Talk of a £60bn “fiscal black hole” is, he said, “an insult to the concept of a black hole, which is an all-consuming entity that sucks in everything. The arrival of first Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak in Downing Street has given new life to many of the myths that Chang has spent his career debunking. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Spices told the story of how the corporation “made capitalism a great success but is now slowly strangling it” chilli prompted a discussion of how “care work is neglected and undervalued, despite being at the foundation of our economy and society”. Chang’s prawns feature in one chapter on why “developing countries need to use protectionism against superior foreign competition” my beef gyozas recalled another chapter on why “free trade doesn’t mean freedom for all”. “Over time I’ve become more and more convinced that in a capitalist economy, democracy is meaningless without everyone knowing some economics because so many decisions are bound up with it,” Chang explained when we met in Sushi Samba, a JapaneseSouth American restaurant, in central London.Īs we ate, the subjects of Chang’s book materialised on our plates.

Like others before him – such as John Maynard Keynes, JK Galbraith, Paul Krugman – Chang strives to appeal to a non-specialist audience. The South Korean academic, 59, whose books have sold more than two million copies and been translated into 45 languages, has now revived his original ambition through Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World.

The 2008 financial crisis prompted him to write the lucid 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, which became an international bestseller, and Economics: The User’s Guide (the NS’s John Gray described Chang as “the best critic” of neoliberalism). For 15 years, Ha-Joon Chang had wanted to write a book connecting two of his greatest loves: economics and food.

A hungry economist explains the world