Progress in economic thought comes in three stages; first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they ask you to write a quirky book explaining your ideas to a mass audience. 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. 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.
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”. Instead, they act as jumping-off points for the economics. Curried clam broth leads into consideration of the spice trade, and then to the Dutch East India Company, and then to limited liability companies in general, and to suggestions about how the reform of corporate governance might make it possible to sustain long-term investments in green technology.
