Ha-Joon Chang is an exceptional academic - unique contributions, excellent storyteller, interdisciplinary approaches, and in this book appetizing: "Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes" (2022). This book was not written for academics, but everyday readers who might get pulled into economics, history and politics via food. This book is an easy and enjoyable read (~160 pages), and he continues his typical myth-busting style throughout. Reflecting on my notes, seems I was more interested in Chang's "greens" than the "ice cream" (see first quote below):
"With this book, I'm trying to make economics more palatable by serving it with stories about food. But be warned. The food stories are mostly not about the economics of food - how it is grown, processed, branded, sold, bought and consumed. These aspects are not usually central to the economic stories I have for you. And there are lots of interesting books about them around. My food stories are a bit like the ice cream that some of your moms may have offered to bribe you to eat your greens - except that in this book ice cream comes first, the greens later…" (p. xxv)
"It is a complete myth that people in poor countries, many of which are in the tropics, lack in terms of work ethic. In fact, they work much harder than their counterparts in rich countries. To begin with, usually a much higher proportion of the working age population is working in poor countries than in rich ones. According to data from the World Bank, in 2019, the labor force participation was 83% in Tanzania, 77% in Vietnam and 67% in Jamaica, compared to 60% in Germany, 61% in the US and 63% in South Korea, the supposed nation of workaholics." (p. 24)
"There was much criticism of these policies, not just outside but also inside Japan. Critics pointed out that Japan would be better off if it just imported things like steel and automobiles and concentrated on making things like silk and other textile products, which it was good at. If you protect your inefficient producers of, say, passenger cars (like Toyota and Nissan) by imposing tariffs on foreign cars, consumers either have to pay more than the world market price to get better cars from abroad or drive inferior and uglier Japanese cars, they pointed out. Also, by artificially channeling bank loans into inefficient industries, like automobile production, through government directives, they added, you are taking away funds from efficient industries, like silk, that could be using the same amount of capital to produce far more output. This is an absolutely correct argument - if you take a country's capabilities as a producer as given. However, in the long run, a country can change its productive capabilities and become better at things at which it is not good at today." (p. 43)
"Countries have required MNCs to transfer technology to their subsidiaries or put ceilings on the royalty they can charge for licensing their technologies to the subsidiaries. They have sometimes mandated MNCs to hire more than a certain proportion of the locals in the workforce, or to train workers they hire. To maximize the indirect benefits of MNC investments, they have required the MNC subsidiaries to buy more than a certain proportion of their inputs from local suppliers - this is known as the 'local contents requirement'. These policies were used extensively - and successfully - by countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Finland between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s." (p. 84)
"… the best economists should be, like the best of the cooks, able to combine different theories to have a more balanced view. They understand both the power and the limitations of the market, while knowing that entrepreneurs are the most successful when supported and suitably regulated by the state. They should be willing to combine individualist theories and socialist (or, more broadly, collectivist) theories - and augment them with theories of human capabilities - in order to come up with a more rounded view on issues like inequality, care work and the welfare state." (p. 161-162)