The restaurant is large and, when we walk in, entirely empty, though Chang assures me it’s heaving in the evenings. A 10-minute walk from Chang’s office, it has become his unofficial canteen. We have come to the Rice Boat, a Keralan restaurant specialising in south Indian cuisine. The German physicist Max Planck once said science progresses one funeral at a time.” Still, he reckons the economics profession overall remains resistant to fresh ideas, clinging to its status as a pseudoscience undergirded by unbreakable mathematical rules. In the wake of the global financial crisis, organisations such as the International Monetary Fund – which used to regard him as “an oddity” – regularly invite him to speak. He is, though, a star with a big following. “A lot of economists think I’m not an economist.”

“I don’t do maths,” he says, blinking softly through his round, silver-rimmed spectacles. He is a reader at Cambridge rather than a full professor, a relative sidelining he attributes to his heterodox approach. For him, economics is a tool for changing the world, not for explaining why the world is as we find it. “I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or – the worst of all abuses among economists – a ‘sociologist’.”Ĭhang conducts his guerrilla war against economic orthodoxy from a cramped office at Cambridge university’s Sidgwick site. Yet in an email sent before we meet, he spells out an irony. All in all, he estimates, his books have been bought by more than 1.3m people – not bad for an economist who turned up in Cambridge 27 years ago barely able to speak English. His 23 Things, which claims that free markets don’t exist and that the washing machine changed society more than the internet, has sold 650,000 copies and been translated into 32 languages. The 50-year-old South Korean-born academic is the author of several bestselling books on the subject, leavened with wit and bearing provocative titles such as 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2010) and Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity (2007). In Chang’s hands, though, economics is not dry.

What could be prompting so much passion? You guessed it. At one point he stretches both arms over his head before bringing them together as if along an invisible monkey bar. Sometimes he tightens his fists to emphasise frustration, or holds his hands flat – palms upwards, fingers splayed – as though weighing two bags of rice.

He whirrs them in a tight 360-degree spin or brings them down on the beat like a conductor. Ha-Joon Chang’s hands are chopping the air like helicopter blades.

Han joon chang