Economist Ha-Joon Chang: the Tory mini-budget was like trying to bring back

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.”

A badly executed revival of a failed idea?

“Thatcherism was heavily based on Reaganomics, on the idea that if you give the rich more money, they would reinvest it. In reality, in almost all cases, after they cut taxes for the rich and made them much wealthier, investment actually fell. I’m reminded of that famous quote from Karl Marx about history first as tragedy then farce. If Margaret Thatcher was a tragedy, imposing this untested theory on a nation, then this time it was a really bad joke.”

So: reheated Tex-Mex.

Chang, 59, who grew up in South Korea, taught economics at Cambridge for more than 30 years before taking up a professorship at Soas University of London this summer. He came to global prominence after the financial crash of 2007-8 with two bestselling books that picked over the bones of the carnage wrought by the banks: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism and the shorter, wittier, brilliantly persuasive 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. (Here’s a couple of those things: “The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.” And: “Economics, as it has been practised for the last 30 years has been harmful for most people.”) The philosopher and author John Gray – another master of the telling aphorism – writing in this paper, suggested that Chang was not only the most trenchant critic of disastrous neoliberal orthodoxies, but also that his book was required reading for any political party serious about finding solutions.

Nearly 15 years on from the crisis, Chang is witness to a world that not only did not learn any of those lessons, but which seems determined to repeat the failed ideology to economic and environmental destruction. His new book, Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World, uses brief meditations on the history of trade or flavour of different foodstuffs to illustrate economic truths. If there is a single message in the book, it is that you should run a mile from any politician preaching a single narrow economic faith. Chang looks at economic theory as a buffet rather than a set menu; and believes fusion always creates better flavour than monoculture.

We are having lunch at the King’s Cross branch of the Indian chain Dishoom. Nearly everything we order has a brisk chapter devoted to it in Chang’s book. Okra, for example, helps him to tell the story of the…