Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World

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Un libro escrito con sentido del humor, rigurosidad argumentativa, con alcances literarios y culturales interesantísimos. I enjoyed every one of Chang's food segments that usually included a brief history of what a particular culture eats and some interesting thoughts on recipes and differences between the cultures. In my opinion, this book lacks depth - a facet which especially hurts the obvious agenda-driven nature of the writing. Somehow he manages to smuggle an urgent discussion of the relevance of economics to our daily lives into stories about food and cooking that are charming, funny and sweet (but never sour). I’m certainly not an economist by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like I am leaving this book having learned far more than I expected to, particularly with a firm understanding of the society and world at large that I live in today, and certainly far more prepared to comprehend the ever-developing future stretched out before us.

Now he’s reached the summit of the profession; a fun little book of essays (some of them extended and expanded versions of columns for FT Magazine), restating the case against the Washington consensus through the medium of recipes. Often, it goes a bit off-tangent from the beginning of chapters and you end up in an entirely different plane. P132 “…consumers do not have the time and mental capacity to process all the information on the carbon footprints of their food items…. In Edible Economics, Chang makes challenging economic ideas more palatable by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world.Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. That development obviously shaped Chang’s outlook – in chapters with titles such as Noodle and Banana, he sketches out the story of his home country’s rise, with an emphasis on its protection of infant industries and close regulation of multinational corporations.

Edible Economics was honest, occasionally flawed and surface-level, but ultimately incredibly digestible and often delicious. That makes it so very understandable, put so simply, than the complex sociological and economical theories most of us would find labyrinthine at best and boring or dry at worst. 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.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. 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. 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. The recipes are not likely to give Yotam Ottolenghi much cause for concern – an example is the one for monkfish in curried clam broth, which just says “monkfish, served in a curried clam broth”. As Chang points out, the fact of the matter is that places such as Korea developed because of sustained investment.

I enjoyed the conversational and anecdotal format, and the interlinking of stuff I knew with stuff I didn't. I honestly never thought I would enjoy a book on economics, but I found myself fascinated the whole way through. Ha-Joon Chang teaches economics at SOAS University of London, and is one of the world's leading economists. 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.Część rzeczy miałem wrażenie, że pokrywa się z poprzednią czytaną przeze mnie książką tego samego autora: 23 rzeczy. It doesn't necessarily translate to how food/ingredients shape the global economy but it tries to draw parallelisms into economic concepts. The author does address the strange connections he makes in the afterword, though perhaps I would have liked to have known what to expect a little more in the beginning. Government services: the IRS has ancient technology as do air traffic controllers - all thanks to our government leaders.

P 130: “ [re climate change, the government decides what you eat] “…changing our eating habits can have a big impact…. I do appreciate the author’s evident extended effort to present ideas and concepts fairly, particularly multiple discussions of different versions and perspectives of the same theories, but the overarching author’s voice and bias is still ever-present. Co zaskakujące autor bardzo płynnie przechodzi z tematów kulinarnych do tematów ogólnoekonomiczno- społecznych. Yes, if you're an adventurous eater like me, who also likes micro-history books and the mixing of topics in an amenable way.This might not be the book for you if you aren't interested to know about some random food facts and already know some basics of economics. 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”. 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.