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Masoud Golsorkhi Why did you choose food as a hook for your latest book?
Ha-Joon Chang I want as many people as possible to be interested in and to learn about economics. Without every citizen having some knowledge of economics, democracy is meaningless in a capitalist society. So many things are driven by economic logic; so many decisions are made on the basis of economic theory. If you don’t know the basic economic theories, you really don’t know what you’re voting for or against – you’re voting for, “This looks like a guy who I could have a beer with”, or “I don’t like the look of that woman”. It is my duty and the duty of all economists to make economics accessible to all citizens, because only then can we have a meaningful democracy. This was the trigger on my part to draw in as many people as possible into economic discussions.

MG Why do you think there’s reluctance to question economics? People are happy to research how to cure cancer, or Covid-19, themselves, but they don’t seem to want to look for answers to economic problems on their own.
HJC The reason why people are much less willing to question economic orthodoxy than orthodoxies in sciences or medicine is because neoclassical economics, in modern times, has become the ruling ideology, the equivalent of Catholic theology in medieval Europe: an ideology that tells people that things are what they are because they have to be. You think there’s too much inequality, because without huge rewards investors and inventors are not going to get out of their bed to do their work. You think that the environment is being destroyed, but somehow the market will come in and rescue it. All these ideas about what is possible, what is feasible, what is necessary, are defined by economics these days. Without realising, people have been… brainwashing is too strong a word here, but taught to think in a certain way that doesn’t challenge the underlying social order, the distribution of income, wealth and power. So, while people are willing to drink bleach to cure Covid, they’re not willing to contemplate re-nationalising the railways or raising corporation taxes. That is the consequence of economics becoming part of the power structure – it has become naturalised. You don’t ask why the sky is blue; you don’t ask why if you drop things, they will fall to the ground.

MG That starts at universities; of course, so many politicians and top civil servants in the UK studied PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics]. I guess they are all taught the orthodoxy? Is the curriculum being diversified? Are there any signs of hope?
HJC The teaching of economics has changed since the financial crisis, but not enough; that’s the short answer. The long answer is, after the financial crisis there was a huge student movement in the UK and all across the world to demand a fundamental change in the teaching of economics. Until then, the students were told that the free market works, that government intervention is bad, the financial market will find an equilibrium, and that there cannot be a financial crisis. Suddenly, there’s this crisis and the professors had nothing to say. The students organised themselves into this movement called Rethinking Economics to demand changes in university curricula. Unfortunately, little change has been made. The University of Cambridge, where I used to teach, introduced a new course on the history and philosophy of economics, teaching students how different schools of economics have evolved, how they have different methodologies and philosophies around the world. These are things that were taught in most universities until the 1960s and 1970s but eliminated in the 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately, academics are the last people to change. In politics, people demand new strategies. There’s a financial crisis, there’s the cost-of-living crisis, and the government is forced to do something about it, as with Covid when the government paid 80% of the wages for people who would have been unemployed if it had been left to the market. Business people also have to react to a changing reality. Academics’ identities are in ideas, and they don’t want to be told to change what they think or change what they teach their students. There has been great resistance.

Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell YouAbout Capitalism, Penguin, 2011. The book has sold over 1,500,000 copies across 39 countries

MG The progressive economic policies that were proposed during the 2017 and 2019 election cycles were often discussed with reference to the spectre of the 1970s. A wage-price spiral and massive inflation, rubbish not being collected and the dead left unburied… Why do you think the 1970s still hold the public’s imagination?
HJC When you talk about progressive economic policies, people often come back with the bad old 1970s – low growth, high inflation, which will catalyse stagflation and social conflict. That is an important myth that has been created by the right-wing media and free-market economists. Let’s look at the objective statistics: the world economy did very well in the 1950s to the early 1970s. The world economy grew at 3.1% in per capita terms between 1955 and 1970. Between 1970 and 1980, growth rate fell to 1.9%. So, compared to the previous period, it was a significant fall. Yet since the 1980s, when we introduced all these free-market reforms known as neoliberal policies, the economic growth rate of the world has been only 1.5%. Even in the bad old 1970s, the world economy was growing faster than in the last four decades of neoliberalism. Yes, the 1970s had high inflation, but in other respects that economy was much more stable. During the 1970s, there were hardly any financial crises, whereas you run out of fingers if you count only the major financial crises since the 1980s – the Chilean crisis, the Scandinavian financial crisis, the savings-and-loan crisis in the US, all in the late 1980s. The Mexican peso crisis happened in 1994, the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, Russia, Brazil, up to 2008 and the global financial crisis. The economy might have been somewhat unstable in terms of inflation in the 1970s but in other respects, it’s not clear whether that decade was so bad. On top of that, you have raging inequality these days in most countries, whereas in the 1970s most societies hadn’t. Even in those days, inequality was very high in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, but in Europe, North America and other advanced industrial economies, inequality was very low in the 1970s. There was social conflict, strikes and so on, but do we not have conflicts today? We’ve got strikes going on, people electing ridiculous populist leaders in all sorts of countries, a lot of violence. Yes, there were the dead left unburied, but how about the millions and millions of people who died of Covid-19 simply because the government wasn’t channelling enough resources into healthcare?

MG One crucial step in depoliticising economic policy or elevating economics above politics in the UK was Gordon Brown giving the Bank of England the authority to set interest rates, essentially giving economic advisors control over politics instead of politics having control over economics.
HJC I advocate a lot of government intervention, although I’m not in favour of central planning or anything like that. People say, Yeah, but can you trust the politicians, when they are interested only in the prospect of their re-election? Wouldn’t it be better to leave things to more objective technocrats like the central bankers and the independent regulators of electricity, water or whatever? Of course, in advocating government intervention I’m not assuming that the government is the modern equivalent of Plato’s philosopher king. The government is made up of people with their own interests – politicians seeking re-election, government bureaucrats wanting to expand the budgets and manpower they control, never mind the consequences for the national economy – all these lobbying groups that influence and even bribe politicians and other policymakers. You have to take account of reality.

The argument that economics is rational and politics is irrational – the more power you give to economist and technocrats the better – has many, many problems. First of all, this argument assumes that there is an objective way of setting the boundary around the economy, that there is an objective entity called the economy which can be scientifically defined, and any intrusion of political logic into it is a bad thing. But as I said in one of my earlier books, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, there is no such thing as a free market because all markets have underlying regulations and restrictions. Let’s take a couple of examples – 200 years ago, a lot of people thought it was OK to buy and sell people. From those people’s point of view, trying to abolish slavery was destroying our free market through a very important class of asset called human beings. As a free-market economist, would you support slavery or not? Two hundred years ago or 100 years ago depending on the country, child labour was legal. If someone today says we should bring back child labour, isn’t that person more of a free-market advocate then the rest of society? A free market is politically defined. It doesn’t make sense to say that one group of people is political, and the other is not. They engage in politics through different means. When central bankers say, “We have to do this or do that”, do you assume that they are totally objective? Their worldview is strongly influenced by the worldview of the financial capitalist. Let’s not mince words – these people very often run their policies with a view to getting a plum job after they leave their current job. Simply because their politics are not exercised through the ballot box doesn’t mean that they are not political. That’s the biggest problem with this argument. Secondarily, the view that economics is rational and politics is irrational also ignores the fact that different economic theories define economics differently. For some people, basic services like clean water and safe shelter and so on have to be basic human rights. For others, those are commodities like everything else. Choosing between the two is a political decision; there is no economic theory that says that water should be nationalised or left to the free market. Economics is politically determined, even when you accept certain boundaries between economics and politics. Even within economics itself there is a lot of disagreement on what should be in the market. You can’t say that one kind of economic theory is more political than others – they just have different politics.

MG Most economic policies including redistributive or progressive models still rely on or emphasise the importance of growth. But growth comes with ecological costs; it is inherently extractive. How do you consider the need for growth in the light of environmental concerns?
HJC Economic growth comes with environmental costs. Until 20 or 30 years ago, we didn’t even think about the environmental consequences of economic growth, but now we realise that if we don’t do something radical we might literally run out of the planet. It’s very important to consider the environmental consequences of economic growth, but we have to think about it in a different way. First of all, very poor countries with, say, below $5,000 per capita income need growth, as there is no way they can provide a decent standard of living without substantial economic growth. The good news is that whatever these countries do, the impact on the global environment is going to be very, very small. And they need to be allowed to grow. These are countries that have done virtually nothing to create this climate-change problem, but are suffering disproportionately from the consequences of climate change; some of these countries are literally disappearing under the sea. It’s another story for the rich countries; they don’t need that much economic growth anymore, they just need to think of ways to improve the quality of life and living standards for people without having an impact on the environment. Part of it will be simply not growing, but you could also do that by coming up with technologies that have minimal climate impact. We have seen quite a lot of progress in that respect, for instance, the price of solar electricity has fallen by over 90% in the last couple of decades. There is room for generating economic growth with less climate impact by inventing better technologies, by reorganising living spaces. In the US, you need a major infrastructure reorganisation in order to reduce carbon footprint because a lot of people have to drive a lot simply because that’s how the living space is organised. Europeans find it easy to feel superior to Americans because they cycle seven miles every day to work and back, but try to do that when your home is 80 miles from your work. Middle-income countries like China have more complicated positions because some parts of these countries are as rich as parts of Europe or America, whereas in others people still live on less than $1.50 a day. These countries need a lot of fine-tuning in terms of still generating more economic growth, but also trying to minimise their carbon footprint. A lot of people on the left find it easy to dismiss growth, but for developing countries, you need it. Growth is not just about material acquisition; it is about living longer. It’s about not having to see your child die when they are two or three; it’s having a job that’s less backbreaking or eating another bowl of rice. At low levels of development, growth is absolutely necessary. Of course, it has to be an equitable growth, so that whatever growth is generated is not all sucked up by the elite, but at that level of development you need growth. We need a more nuanced approach to economic growth.

MG My favourite chapter of Edible Economics was “Chilli”, about the economic value of care. I think you credit your wife in the book. When did you start looking at care, and what did you observe?
HJC I have always recognised care as a fundamental issue but felt underqualified to talk about it. My wife pushed me to write about it. I read quite a few things and did some serious research and came up with this chapter called “Chilli” that talks about care, by which I mean childbearing, child rearing, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the sick and the elderly – it is so fundamental that without it society and the economy cannot exist. More broadly there’s health care and teaching. If you extend it further, there’s producing food, distributing food, delivering things, maintaining infrastructure, running the transportation system; all these things make society and the economy that is nestled within society possible. This is almost invisible in mainstream economics and really undervalued. There are two reasons for that, one being the patriarchy because women provide not all but almost all of the care within families and communities, and that work is basically invisible. Even in the commercialised sectors where care work is more visible than what is being done at home, it’s not even counted as part of national output. Even the visible ones that are traded in the market are very much low paid. There is huge systemic discrimination against women, which make this vital range of activities hugely undervalued. Care work at home is not even paid, not even recognised. We talk about working mothers as if the mothers at home aren’t working. The other important reason is the nature of a capitalist system built around the market in which the value of a thing is not determined by how important it is, but rather determined by how important it is for people who have money and are willing to pay for it. The best illustration of this is that during the middle of the Covid pandemic, when healthcare staff were getting sick and dying because they didn’t have enough personal protective equipment and people in old people’s homes were also contracting the disease and dying because there was not enough resources to provide adequate care for them, while at the same time, you had the space race between these billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. If it wasn’t a market system, you would have definitely said dealing with the pandemic will protect the most people; it’s vital for maintaining the fabric of society. But it didn’t work like that because it is a market-based system and whoever has the money determines what is supplied. Many people don’t have the money to pay for care, so you end up putting huge burdens on women to provide it for free at home in communities. We have to start taking care work seriously; we have to recognise that it’s the foundation of our very existence. On the basis of those perspectives, you need to provide some kind of institutional and political arrangements to make it possible for this work to be truly recognised. During the early days of the pandemic, in the UK, you had this campaign to clap for the carers; I think it lasted for about ten weeks. Yet when the pay negotiation for the NHS came, some months later, the government offered 1% increase, which is actually a reduction in real terms, because inflation was at that time running at 3%.

MG Platform capitalism – these digital semi-monopolies with highly valued stocks – presents a new form of economic power structure. What is your recipe for reforming, or at least mitigating the worst excesses of platform capitalism?
HJC We actually know the answer already because it’s equivalent to what happened with railways and water supplies and so on. If one group of people control a vital structure, they will be able to exploit the rest of society to a huge extent. What have we done in the past to deal with them? Many countries nationalised them, others didn’t nationalise them, but regulated them very heavily, so that they would offer an adequate return, but not extend their power. If money concentrates too much then it begins to spill into politics and it determines what kind of politics we have. With platform capitalism, a lot of them control people’s communication and acquisition of information. What companies like Facebook and Twitter allowed or didn’t allow affected the results of elections and the treatment of the pandemic, literally decided how many people die, where and for what. Once you become that important, once you become that vital to the rest of society, you can’t say, “Well, we are just a company, why should we be regulated more than others?” We need to go back to the old days. These companies need either nationalisation or some kind of global public arrangement.

MG Historically when markets were reformed due to moral or economic imperative, for example in the case of the abolition of slavery, the slave owners were fully compensated – but not the slaves. Currently, we have an excessive condensation of capital under the control of ever smaller groups of people, which is destructive for capitalism itself. How do you best flush accumulated capital through the system?
HJC We have to start with the recognition that companies make money with a lot of privileges provided by society. If there wasn’t limited liability, these people wouldn’t have been able to do massive IPOs and attract a lot of investors. It’s a social arrangement, limited liability was something that you could get only with special permission from the king or the government until the mid- to late 19th century, depending on the country. A lot of people are against it, because they said, Well, if people don’t have skin in the game, they are going to be lax, they are going to take excessive risk. Adam Smith was for this very reason against limited liability. I’m in favour of limited liability, but it’s not a natural thing; it’s the kind of thing that society has created in order to encourage large-scale investment. If that society decides that some people have got excessive advantage from this or any other arrangement, like patent protection, society has the right to take it back. You also have to recognise that, as you said, in the case of compensating the slave owners but not the slaves, many, many people have already been exploited by the monopolies of platform capital. Why are we not thinking about giving them compensation, and instead worried that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos will earn two billion less than what they could have done? Why are we only worried about those people? In the end, we’re in this position because they were not as regulated as they could have been. By being lightly regulated, they were given permission to make a lot more money than they could have under another arrangement. I don’t see anything wrong with taking money away from these people. Of course, you’ll have to assess it properly and decide on some clear principles. I’m not in favour of arbitrary confiscation, and in some cases, you might want to compensate them for taking their shares or nationalising. These are things that you need to decide on the basis of careful research and discussions. You’re going to get all kinds of simplistic positions and say we have to take everything away from them, or we should fully compensate. But the very value of their assets are determined by social arrangements. It’s not something that God or nature has given them. So, society has the right to change that.

MG Has your interest in food made you a better economist?
HJC I think so. First of all, food makes you realise that there is no absolute truth. It makes you naturally pluralist. I love all kinds of different foods here – Italian, Korean, Mexican, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, you name it – and you cannot say that the Korean food is the best because they are all so different. Economics is a bit like that. There are many different schools of economics – I talked about the nine biggest ones in my previous book, Economics: The User’s Guide – but depending on how you subdivide some of the bigger schools, there could easily be 20 different schools of economics based on very different intellectual traditions, political viewpoints, ethical positions, understanding of how the economy works, what aspect of the economy they focus on. Is it the market, the government, the workers? They give you such different flavours. It would be foolish to talk about one kind of economics that is the best, because economics is not a science, like physics or chemistry. It’s a system of thought and logic based on some pretty fundamental assumptions about human nature, political values, ethical principles, which cannot be scientifically determined. Being interested in food also makes you more historically aware, and more aware of the dark side of capitalism. In the standard economic or journalistic understanding of the history of capitalism that you see in the Economist or the Wall Street Journal, the world was a largely happy place with people crossing the oceans to get new things and importing different things into different parts of the world. When you learn a bit about the history of food, which is contained  in the book, you learn that the banana was central to  the slave economy; the banana was the root cause of the phenomena called the banana republic, banana-producing economies around the Caribbean Basin totally dominated by American fruit companies backed by the military power of the United States. From these histories you also learn how so many things that we think are natural are actually results of colonialism and imperialism. When did Kenya and Sri Lanka produce tea? Tea was monopolised by China and only because the British brought these things to its colonies did these countries become main tea producers. Cacao is a South American crop, but the biggest cocoa producers are Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia because the French, the British and the Dutch brought this crop to their colonies. Most people don’t think about this; they think capitalism has been run as a global marketplace: you go there, you buy a bag of peas, you buy that little bit of spice, and so on. It wasn’t like that. Thinking about the origins of food and how different items are shifted around the globe according to the logic of global capitalism makes you realise that this kind of fantasy version of global capitalism where everyone was happy and everyone were equal trading partners is such a myth. And once you begin to see that then you begin to see the power structure behind the global economy and then you begin to understand that you cannot understand economics without understanding politics. Food gives depth to your understanding of capitalism, but above all, I love food. Eating different things, cooking different things is such a joy.

MG The French president Jacques Chirac once quipped at Tony Blair: “You can’t trust people who can’t cook.” ◉