Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

by Katrine Marcal

Overview

How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. When economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest, he used the example of the baker and the butcher as he laid the foundations for 'economic man,' arguing that the baker and butcher didn't give bread and meat out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an ironic point of view coming from a bachelor who lived with his mother for most of his life—a woman who cooked his dinner every night.The economic man has dominated our understanding of modern-day capitalism, with a focus on self-interest and the exclusion of all other motivations. Such a view point disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking. It insists that if women are paid less, then that's because their labor is worth less.A kind of femininst Freakonomics, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? charts the myth of economic man—from its origins at Adam Smith's dinner table, its adaptation by the Chicago School, and its disastrous role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis—in a witty and courageous dismantling of one of the biggest myths of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681771854
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	06/07/2016
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	231,196
File size:	774 KB

About the Author

Katrine Marcal is the lead editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, where she writes articles on Swedish and international politics, economics and feminism. For her book Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, she was shortlisted for the August Prize and won the Lagercrantzen Award. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

04/04/2016
Journalist Marcal won several awards for the original Swedish edition of this book, but the translation, although wittily written, is meandering and slow-paced, making it a tough match for an American audience. Using Adam Smith’s iconic “economic man” as a trope on which to hang her argument, Marcal discusses the appeal of the narrative of the driven, profit-making man, which has left women—whose jobs have only shifted from in-home to out-of-home relatively recently—lagging. She suggests that “maybe the changes achieved by the women’s movement in the last 40 years... have simply highlighted an inherent contradiction in society between care work and competition.” Marcal’s discussion of the economic philosophy behind the gender wage gap and the “broken promises” of feminism is interesting, but the framing device of using historical figures such as Adam Smith (and the person in question who cooked his dinner—Margaret Douglas, his mother) never really gets off the ground. More narrative than prescriptive, more food for thought than fount of answers, this ambitious but too-slim book will have a hard time finding readers outside of the European market. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Marçal provides a complete history of the ideas behind, and subsequent realities of, market economics. She is a writer’s writer, using brilliant literary and historical metaphors to bring clarity and life to the story.

800CEORead (Editor's Choice)

An interesting and thoughtful read.

The Billfold

A smart, funny, readable book on economics, money [and] women.

Margaret Atwood (on Twitter)

Thoughtfully challenges conventional assumptions about work, productivity, and value. An enjoyable read, and dryly witty.

The Baffler

Katrine Marçal’s searing new book exposes the flaws of classical economics and its modern incarnations and in particular its missionary zeal to subordinate all other human aims at the altar of the market. With wit and a hefty dose of anger, she tells a convincing story of the history of economic man. A powerful, and entertaining, story.

Prospect Magazine

Sharp writing, numerous examples and familiar pop culture references (think Pretty Woman, Robinson Crusoe, and the goose that laid the golden egg). Engaging and non-threatening (even for people who break into a sweat when trying to balance their checkbooks). An important book.

Pop Matters

This is not your standard economics text. Marçal, who writes in snappy (and often spirited) prose, focuses on what an alternative, and more inclusive, economics should look like. An accessible and lively primer on the topic. A well-written and thoroughly researched call to change economics into a discipline that makes “room for the entire human existence” that all economists would do well to heed.

Science News

A sprawling, engaging feminist polemic. Interesting.

New York Times Book Review

Marçal’s romp through the development of the field and the work of Smith, Keynes, Freud, the Chicago School, and Lawrence Summers (among others) is as diverting as it is thoughtful, especially as she points out the gaping hole at its center: the places where self-interest and the market can’t quite reach. Midway through her book, Marçal writes about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique — in its own way, this vivid, entertaining work is equally groundbreaking.

The Boston Globe

A spirited and witty manifesto. Commanding rhetoric punctuated with spiky wit.

New Statesman

An excellent argument for the value of feminism as an analytical lens. A masterpiece of rhetoric, clearheaded analysis, and critical imagination. a model of radical thought. Marçal’s critique—and the anti-capitalist feminist tradition on which it stands—is a historical insight of unimaginable potential.

New Republic

A no-holds-barred critique of how modern economic theory has largely excluded the contributions of women. She drives her point home with the ferocity of a hammer striking an anvil: economic man is a fiction that excludes women.

Booklist