Food for thought: a novel approach to explaining economics

Edible Economics The World in 17 Dishes
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Ha-Joon Chang, Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes (Penguin, 2023). 

What does a strawberry have in common with a chatbot? This isn’t a trick question, but one of seventeen clever parallels drawn in a new book by Ha-Joon Chang, professor of economics at SOAS. The answer? It’s all to do with the automation of labour. 

Strawberries are difficult to harvest, as anyone who’s been roped into a pick-your-day can tell you: they’re usually hidden towards the centre of an irregular, leafy plant, and have to prised out gently. It doesn’t help that strawberry bushes are only a few inches off the ground, either. Picking them is slow work, and resistant to automation. Robots, no matter how dexterous or brainy, struggle to navigate the task. Instead, it’s cheaper, easier and more efficient to get humans – usually poorly-paid migrant labourers – to pick strawberries. The work, though literally backbreaking, is protected from automation. 

But just as it’s very difficult to get a robot to pick a strawberry, it’s very easy to get a chatbot or other artificial intelligence to do clerical tasks and other white-collar work. Already, AI programs can write decent code, churn out advertising copy and journalism, create near-perfect fake photographs, plan and run an effective social media strategy, do customer service, organise logistics and warehousing, and race through admin. Bots programmed to follow market trends already execute the vast majority of financial trades, while AI can do most of the routine tasks that junior accountants and paralegals start their careers with. By 2030, it’s safe to assume that AI could do most, if not all, professional work. What will become of the middle class?

There is, Chang points out, a certain irony here. The working class has borne the brunt of forty years of globalisation and deindustrialisation, trading well-paid jobs in manufacturing for insecure low-end service jobs and deaths of despair. Although automation rarely leads to mass unemployment – people put out of work usually find an alternative when the new technology creates different jobs – what economists rarely recognise is that these new jobs are often worse than what came before. Either they are paid more poorly, or they lack the dignity and purpose of older jobs, leading to anomie, disillusionment and damaging the social fabric. When your grandfather built ships on the Clyde and had a house and family of his own at 24, it’s not quite the same to be offered the choice between the supermarket, the call centre or the dole. Those who blithely assume that the AI revolution will just create new, different jobs for the middle class should bear this in mind. Now, many knowledge workers will face the same future the working class were condemned to: lost opportunities, limited horizons and a life of less well-paid, less meaningful busywork. The idea of the knowledge economy was always a fragile thing; it will not survive the age of AI. 

Few countries are as ominously ill-prepared for the changes that AI will wreak as Britain, as Chang makes clear in a chapter on, of all things, chocolate. But why chocolate? Everyone knows that the Swiss make the best chocolate in the world – but many have also pointed to Switzerland as the example par excellence of a specialised service economy. We think of Switzerland and we think of discreet financial services and other highly-paid knowledge work like IT and business consulting. Surely, the argument goes, if the Swiss can create a high-wage, prosperous economy by specialising in services, then so can Britain. 

But Britain can’t – because Switzerland doesn’t. Switzerland isn’t a pure service economy, but a manufacturing powerhouse. It’s not just the obvious things like chocolate and watches, but also a number of things we don’t see in the shops: weapons, machinery, precision instruments and industrial chemicals. As Chang writes, ‘the ability to produce manufactured goods competitively remains the most important determinant of a country’s prosperity’. Switzerland makes a lot of things, excellently. This foundation in the tangible economy is what allows it to have a services sector. Services contribute greatly to national economies – not least by sucking up the labour of excess graduates who won’t pick strawberries – but they can only exist alongside an industrial base. Making a post-industrial service-based economy is like trying to build a house entirely out of windows. Who knew that you could hide such weighty subjects in a short essay about chocolate? 

Edible Economics is full of more such neat parallels. A chapter about spices leads to a discussion about multinational corporations; anchovies spark an excellent essay on industrial policy; and lime is used to explore how new technologies change the global economy. (In case you were wondering: the English and Dutch East India Companies, formed to search for spices, were the first modern multinationals; anchovies were food for seagulls whose waste became guano, an enormously valuable fertiliser that powered the Industrial Revolution; and lime juice prevented scurvy, allowing European naval expansion). 

Professor Chang is very much a man of the left, so some of his arguments and observations might not fly with any readers dedicated to unchaining free markets. Occasionally the book can seem to underestimate the intelligence of its audience; while some of his parallels are a bit of a stretch (personally, I struggled to grasp the equivalence between feminist theories of labour and the chillies in Sichuan food). But none of this should not detract from what is, overall, a charming, informative and admirably concise exploration of modern economics.

Sean Paterson

Sean Paterson