All photos ⓒ Chaeyoung Hwang

Professor Ha-Joon Chang joined SOAS as Research Professor in Economics in 2022 after 32 years teaching at Cambridge. Professor Chang is also Co-director of the Centre for Sustainable Structural Transformation, and the Development Leadership Dialogue Institute.

His most recent book, Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes won praise for its accessible way of talking about economics. It uses different food and recipes to highlight important economic principles and arguments, starting with garlic, an ingredient vital to the cuisine of Korea, where he grew up.

When Professor Chang was born in the early 1960s, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its per capita income was less than half that of Ghana, and one 11th of Argentina’s. This gave him an interesting perspective on economics.

“This was the time of the so-called East Asian miracle when economies were growing eight, ten or twelve percent per year. Society was being transformed, millions of people moved from the countryside to work in factories and urban areas, cities were growing, and in general, living standards were getting higher.

There were also nasty things going on: South Koreans were working around 58 hours per week - nothing compared with the average British worker during the Industrial Revolution, which was 80-90 hours a week - but by the standard of the 60s and 70s, the longest in the world. It was ruled by brutal military dictatorships, although at the equivalent stage of industrialisation, no country in today’s rich world had true democracy.

Things were changing, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. I wanted to understand what was going on, so I decided to study economics, but I became disillusioned with mainstream neoclassical economics that made up most of our curriculum. Huge transformations were going on outside the classrooms and our professors were teaching equilibrium economics – I couldn’t take it seriously.

My friends and I started reading outside, which gave me the basis for becoming what I proudly call myself: a pluralist economist. This is the view that there isn’t just one right way of doing economics, there are many different ways and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. In order to understand this complex world, you need to learn many different perspectives.

There were a number of economists in Cambridge who were using different approaches, so I went to Cambridge to study for my Master’s and PhD.”

Who are your influences?

One is Karl Marx, but another is Friedrich Hayek who are at polar opposites of the political spectrum. In the middle is Herbert Simon, economist and one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence.

People ask ‘How can you be a fan of Marx and Hayek at the same time?’ I tell them I don't agree with the conclusions that they draw for society, but they are profound thinkers and I learnt so much from reading them.

What is your current work at SOAS? 

I have set up two new units. One is the Development Leadership Dialogue Institute (DLD), which brings together different segments of the development community: government officials, private sector, international organisations, civil society, and academia. There’s a lot of discussion about development but this happens in silos, governments talk to governments, but not to the private sector. Through workshops, conversation and debates, the DLD brings different perspectives together to try to come up with broader based and politically robust development strategies. The other is the Centre for Sustainable Structural Transformation (CSST), which works on development strategies in the context of ecological crisis, including but not limited to climate change. 

The challenge is how to help developing countries cope with climate change and other ecological crises, to which they contributed minimally, but the bulk of whose consequences they are suffering. How do countries make the transition to green energy and deal with the consequences of ecological crises while also developing and upgrading their economies and the wellbeing of their citizens?

Even those who think that rich countries need to recognise their historical responsibilities and act as good citizens often think that this means just giving money and technology, without the notion that developing countries need to restructure and upgrade their economies themselves. We consider what policies the countries could use, and if they are to use them, how the international economic systems can be reformed; WTO rules, bilateral investment agreements, etc all constrain what developing countries can do.

We also consider how to build political coalition within developing countries to engage in green industrialisation. Many countries depend on fossil fuel exports and even those who are not exporters are dependent on them for energy. In South Africa, the electricity system is dependent on coal, most of it locally produced. If you say: ‘We are going to green the economy and shut down all coal plants’, you won’t have much energy and there would be thousands of unemployed coal miners. 

CSST is also concerned with ‘critical minerals’, which are considered so for Western countries to maintain their lifestyles without further ruining the planet – lithium for car batteries, platinum for electrolysis, cobalt for batteries. We make it clear that they are critical only from a certain perspective.

These minerals are in high demand, so what can we do for these countries so that they can use these minerals in order to eventually diversify and upgrade their economies so that they don’t become dependent on them?

In my book Edible Economics, the chapter Anchovy discusses how again and again countries have a resource – anchovies, saltpetre, cochineal beetles – but when someone develops another technology these become much less valuable. Minerals face the same danger.

A Chinese company announced that they had developed a sodium battery for cars. It hasn’t been commercialised yet, but once that happens, the demand for lithium may be lower, so countries like Argentina, Bolivia and Chile which are mining lithium may lose out. Even if demand grows and they keep making money, one day the mines will run out. They either need to use the earnings from exporting to build new industries or they need to do more things with the minerals. 

In my book, the chapter Banana discusses this issue. Indonesia possesses around 80% of the world’s nickel deposits and the government recently started requiring international companies to process the nickel in Indonesia. Several companies have invested and are now processing the minerals there and hopefully in the coming years, Indonesia can develop better industries out of that.

What other work are you undertaking?

One major area is advising international organisations, governments, the private sector and civil society. I’ve worked with dozens of governments and the UN organisations concerned with economics, such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN Industrial Development Organisation.

I also try to engage seriously with the public. I believe that in a democracy, voting is meaningless unless people understand some economics. I’ve written several popular economics books and I give lectures at literary festivals and bookshops. I also talk to a lot of young students, not just at universities, but in schools.

What should everyone know about economics?

If I have to choose only one thing, I would say that people should know that economics is not a science like physics. You shouldn’t believe it when someone – the Chancellor, or a professor – says that we have to do something because it is the only way.

Expertise is very important, but experts are usually highly specialist and don’t often see the big picture. There are also different types of experts. Expertise needs to be placed in wider society. Why should people working in the Bank of England, or the Treasury, or professors teaching in the mainstream economics departments decide how society should be run? They have expertise on economics, but even that can be challenged. Society might say ‘It might be more costly, but we don’t want a society where old people freeze to death in winter even if it costs more money.’

How can people find well-informed opinions?

You have to look at opinions generated by people with credentials. You may read something from the Bank of England or the Chancellor who have credentials, but there will be people who write differing opinions about these in reputable places, think tanks or activist organisations in this country and around the world who are critical of the mainstream opinions: the Resolution Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, or the IPPR.

There are also groups like Progressive Economy who gather opinions formed through lived experience, who try to see things through the views of real people rather than abstract models – the struggle of a person working three jobs and their experience of inflation, for example. 

We shouldn’t denounce experts, but there are different and wider views.

What does everyone believe about economics that isn’t true?

The most pernicious belief is that the national economy is like a household, so you cannot spend more than you earn, that we ‘maxed out the national credit card’. This is completely wrong. It has been criticised since at least the time of John Maynard Keynes in the early 20th century and it has been proven not to work over and over again, but it has such a hold on us.

The national economy is not a household, it is made of different houses and different people, and collectively speaking we generate each other’s income and expenditure. My income is your expenditure. Imagine a baker and a customer. The customer has a cut in their working hours, and they buy less from the baker. The baker has to buy fewer raw ingredients, like flour, eggs, and butter, which affects the farmers, so there is a whole chain of effect.

In those circumstances, it might make sense for the government to give the customer a subsidy so they can buy more bread, the baker can keep buying from the farmer and so on, keeping the economy going. This can generate more tax revenue and, in the end, there could be more money than you spent in subsidy. This is a simplistic way of looking at the central idea in John Maynard Keynes.

In the chapter Chilli in Edible Economics, I explain that GDP calculations also exclude certain activities. Internationally, people – mostly women – do care work and household work without being paid. They give their labour for free to the national economy, so all these women are basically subsidising the capitalist system.

There are, essentially unproven, assertions that we should give more money to people at the top so that they can invest and generate more income, wealth and jobs, and therefore we will all be better off. This is known as trickle-down economics. Logically it isn’t incorrect, and actually it has worked in very specific circumstances, such as in the early days of Chinese economic reform, but in the developed economies since the 1980s it has never worked.

Is there difference in perception about economics between the Global North and Global South?

It depends on where. In Western societies, there is a lot of talk of the world entering the new era of ‘poly-crisis’, but is that how it is from everyone’s point of view? If you compare per capita income in China in 1978, the year before economic reforms began, and per capita income today, it has increased by 80 times. If you talk to a well-to-do Chinese person, they might ask ‘What crisis?’ If you are living in one of the poorer performing African economies, you might have experienced a fall in living standards over the same period, but even there, their lives didn’t enter a crisis period in the last 10 years; it’s a much longer time. So perspective is very important. If you accept and believe in only one perspective, you lose sight of so many things. 

You used food as a focus across Edible Economics, so what would your final meal be?

It would be a Korean stew made with kimchi and pork belly called Kimchi-jjigae. In my book, I said that I don't actually need to eat Korean food, I most often cook Italian, but if it's a final meal, it'll be that with Gim – roasted black seaweed with sesame oil and salt wrapped around rice.