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Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story About Women and Economics Paperback – 5 Mar 2015

by Katrine Marcal (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars 10 customer reviews
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Frequently Bought Together

  • Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story About Women and Economics
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  • Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays
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  • We Should All Be Feminists
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Product details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd (5 Mar. 2015)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1846275644
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846275647
  • Product Dimensions: 13.5 x 1.6 x 21.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 151,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'Polemical and entertaining… and excellently titled' -- Heather Stewart, Economics editor of Observer

'Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner? His mother, of course. From this compelling insight, Katrine Marçal builds her critique of economic man, exposing him for the sham he really is. Erudite, furious, and eminently readable, this book will send a great many economists running for cover' -- Philip Roscoe, author of I Spend, Therefore I am

'Marçal's book is instructive, angry and funny: economic man has met his match' -- Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman

'Marçal is right that economics simplifies people. The book isn't short of insights and much of Marçal's analysis is thought provoking' --Prospect

'Witty and perceptive, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? is a welcome addition to a canon dominated by men. With feminist incisiveness she looks at the mess we're in' --New Internationalist

'In commanding rhetoric punctuated with spiky wit, Katrine Marçal does not seek to yoke every last aspect of our lives to the tyranny of Homo economicus. Rather, she asks why we have fetishised the myth, and suggests that man denuded of his humanity is not such a figure to aspire to after all' --Caroline Criado-Perez, New Statesman

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. On publication in Sweden, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner was shortlisted for the August Prize and won the Lagercrantzen Award. She lives in London.

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5.0 out of 5 starsDelicious!
By Rough Diamond TOP 500 REVIEWER on 25 Jun. 2015
Format: Paperback
How do you get your dinner? For generations of economists, this has been THE fundamental question of economics. But Katrine Marcal believes the economics fraternity has spent the past 250 years coming up with the wrong answer. Ever since Adam Smith laid the foundations of classical economic theory in The Wealth of Nations, our received wisdom has been that meat, bread and butter ultimately arrive on our dinner tables entirely through the self interest of the butcher, the baker and the dairyman. But even as Mr Smith was first penning these thoughts, his home was filling with the scent of frying steak, and butter was being applied to slices of freshly-purchased bread, all courtesy of Margaret Douglas, Smith's aged and doting mother, who performed these daily tasks for him, for free, and purely out of love.

The fact that Margaret Douglas cooked Adam Smith's dinner, and yet Smith ascribed precisely zero economic value to her work, is Marcal's starting point for a wholly original and brilliantly-written feminist critique of classical, neo-classical and neoliberal economics, and their blinkered and implicitly patriarchal worldviews, which see self-interest and competition as the keys that can unlock a full and complete understanding of how the world really works. But how, Marcal pointedly asks, can these economic theories ever hope to account for the whole of human activity when they are blind to what half the population is doing half of the time?

What makes Marcal's book such a joy to read is the cool, lucid intelligence and bone-dry wit with which she calmly dismantles the whole intellectual superstructure of classical economic theory.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsOpening teenage eyes.
By Granny on 17 April 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
When one of my grandsons commented that his mother had achieved nothing in her life, I was searching for a way to open his teenage eyes.
This book should do it with facts and humour and more humour.
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5.0 out of 5 starsEnjoyable
By Autamme_dot_com TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 6 Sept. 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
Can this reviewer butcher the phrase or idiom “No man is an island” and shoehorn it to state that there is also the female of the species to consider too? This book provides a wonderfully serious, yet light-hearted and incredibly informative look at the role women have in society, as viewed through the lens of an economist, going deep back in history and moving forward to the present-day.

The title is based around economist Adam Smith and one of his claims about self-interest and the “economic man” whilst forgetting that often it was “economic woman” doing the work, providing the womanpower (sic) and supporting the male machine at the same time. Yet this is not a barbed, sour-faced book that goes overboard on equality and feminist issues; it is cleverer than that and you can, after all, catch more flies with sugar than salt…

This is more than just a book about economics. It mixes so many disciplines together and makes for an excellent read. This could be an ideal “commuting companion” when you want to mix light-relief and learn something at the same time. It will have you certainly thinking, unless you have a mind of concrete. Despite it being a light-read, it is not a humour book and the content is of a high calibre and standard. Some of the reported information may shock you and even sadden you.

Ignore it at your peril! Buy it at your earliest convenience! Read it, learn it and share its contents!
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5.0 out of 5 starsIt eloquently takes you through a feminist understanding of economic relations and signposts lots of useful academic texts to mo
By J. Wilson on 2 May 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Journalistic, but highly readable. It eloquently takes you through a feminist understanding of economic relations and signposts lots of useful academic texts to move on to. Great for publicizing the still radical notion that devalued work which has been assigned to women due to their gender, is actually valuable!
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5.0 out of 5 starsFormidable Wit Makes Economics' Dangerous Omissions Clear
By Rickey Gard Diamond on 14 Jun. 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
I remember a similar title on Rosalind Miles great world history of women, Who Cooked the Last Supper? This book measures up, as witty and well researched and presented in small enough chunks you can take a break to think about how huge are omissions of the great economic thinkers. As in all things "female."
She calls out the fiction of the ultra-masculine rational economic man. The market is not the same as physics, as economics was pretending from the 1980s on, nor is it a game. It is made up of many moving parts, its parts being complicated humans within a context that economics abstract theory omits. Her notes, references and bibliography are formidable, but it's her wry wit that makes it all work. I particularly enjoyed learning about Adam Smith's mom and a mysterious beloved cousin. And I so appreciate her analysis of work-life balance for Shanesha Taylor, a representative for millions of women. I admire Marcal's work very much.
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