Review: Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story of Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story of Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal

Goodreads Summary: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.' He argued 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.


Nevertheless, 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. Economics has told us a story about how the world works and we have swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. This story has not served women well. Now it's time to change it.


A kind of feminist 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.



My Review:
This book has been on my list for a while and I finally got around to reading it. While I did learn several things from the book, I was expecting to find more information about the financial contributions that women's unpaid labor provides to the economy as a whole. There was a lot of introductory economic theory which was informative and easy to understand, but the focus was almost always on "economic man". I feel like this whole book was a great starting point, but it never really got to what I wanted, which was the second half of the title, the story of women and economics. I would recommend it to someone looking for an approachable intro to economics.