Economics User Guide Part 1
According to his website: Ha-Joon Chang was born in Seoul, South Korea, on 7 October, 1963 (there are stories about what life was like in South Korea in my youth in the Prologue of my book, Bad Samaritans* and also the Introductory chapter of the latest book, Edible Economics – A Hungry Economists Explains the World*). I came to the UK as a graduate student at the Faculty of Economics and Politics, University of Cambridge in 1986. I earned my PhD in 1992. I taught economics at the Faculty of Economics (as it is called now) and the Development Studies programme at the University of Cambridge between 1990 and 2022. In June 2022, I joined the Department of Economics at The School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London).
I still keep my Korean nationality, but Britain is now my second home. I am still not convinced by the weather and cricket (as a good short-tempered Korean, I don’t have the patience for a game that lasts for five days), but I have come to like HP sauce and Branston pickle. I live in London with my wife, Hee-Jeong Kim, but with no dog (most British authors seem to live with a dog – or three). In his book ECONOMICS: The User’s Guide Professor Chang writes in a particularly entertaining style, that is rare in books by academics. At the Main Street Journal, we feel that his 2014 book should be required reading for any course in business or public administration.
We’ve taken the liberty of reproducing excerpts from both the prologue and epilogue. We’re pretty sure that for most of us, many of the concepts will help “non-experts” challenge what many “expert” policymakers have to say. According to Chang, Economics is supposed to be difficult. Well, perhaps not physics or rocket science difficult, but too difficult for non-economists.
Some of you may remember hearing an economist on the radio making an argument that sounded questionable but accepting it because, after all, he is the expert, and you haven’t even read a proper book on economics. But is economics really that difficult? It doesn’t need to be – if it is explained in plain terms. In my previous book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, I even stuck my neck out and said that 95 percent of economics is common sense, made to look difficult with the use of jargon and mathematics. Economics is not alone in appearing to be more difficult to outsiders than it really is. In any profession that involves some technical competence – be it economics, plumbing, or medicine, jargons that facilitate communication within the profession, make communication with outsiders more difficult. A little more cynically, all technical professions have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated than they really are. That way they can justify the high fees their members charge for their services.