They also come with a health warning: “On no account drink one ingredient,” he writes, which is “liable to lead to tunnel vision, arrogance and possibly brain death”.
Some others . . . may taste like a Planter’s Punch, with different flavours complementing each other.” Some of these cocktails, Chang writes, are “like a Bloody Mary with a lot of Tabasco sauce, given the disagreements present. To highlight this, he offers a number of “cocktails made up of two to four different schools”. He rails against how economics has shifted from “the study of political management of the economy” to become a discipline that, over the past few decades, has increasingly seen itself as a hard science.Įlsewhere, he outlines the predominant schools of economic thought, drawing all sorts of connections between them. Key terms are in bold – hundreds and hundreds of them – and italic summaries appear every few paragraphs.Īppropriately for a book that taps into the old-fashioned spirit of self-improvement, Economics: The User’s Guide is published in the UK by the recently revived Pelican imprint, originally founded in the 1930s to bring intelligent non-fiction to a mass reading public.Ĭhang also happens to be one of the few contemporary economists eager to revive the old-fashioned spirit of political economy.
It’s a brilliant, yet sometimes annoying, book. The first section is a page-turning history, the second a call to arms about how to apply economics in the real world using simple, everyday examples. This is good news for me because I’m out of practice: it’s been 10 years since I studied economics at school. Reassuringly, according to Chang, all one needs to make sense of the global economy via his book is a secondary education. It is time for the rest of us to get involved. Today, unless you are good at maths and science, he writes in Economics: The User’s Guide, you won’t be able to understand economic literature. For too long, argues the South Korean economist, the public has been discouraged from engaging with his subject – and, as a consequence, from participating in some of the most important debates of our age. Ha-Joon Chang’s guerrilla war against free-market orthodoxy continues.
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