In a mouth-watering new book, the South Korean academic fuses his twin passions of food and economics to interrogate capitalism. We should treat economic theory as a buffet rather than a set menu, he urges – and that’s just for starters…
Ha-Joon Chang has written a book linking his two lifelong passions: economics and food. The day we meet for lunch is about midway between the mini-budget and exit Truss. What, I wonder, would be the takeaway equivalent of the tax-cuts-for-the-rich ideas of her doomed government?
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he says with a smile. “I’ve come to the conclusion that [Kwasi Kwarteng’s and Liz Truss’s] economic plans were like an effort to bring back one of those terrible Tex-Mex restaurants that were briefly popular here in the 1990s, before you could get proper Mexican food.”
