"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?"

Some books are so profound they leave you gasping, both at their clarity and their message, and at the basic question of why you never saw things like this before?

"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?" by Katrine Marcal ( ISBN 978 1 84627 564 7) is almost one of those, although the last statement less so I am pleased to be able to say.

Marcal (lead editorial writer for the swedish newspaper Aftonbladet) presents what is billed as a feminist critique of the economic theory that lies at the basis of modern market economies. She questions the complete omission of women from economic modelling, particularly the billions of dollars of unpaid work that women complete every year around the globe.

Her analysis then proceeds beyond that to the underlying assumption of economics at the micro level: the existence of 'economic man' and his capacity for rational decision making.

It is this latter part on which I am pleased to say I often teach the shortcomings of economic theory and models. In my classes I describe what I call the 'weirdness quotient', our propensity to behave in ways that are most often very far from rational.

If you were to dismiss this book as a simple feminist attack on economics you would be selling Marcal and the book short. Her book questions at a deeper level what it is to be human, and how effectively we can ever hope to 'model' the erratic messy irrational ways in which we behave.

The proponents of 'Big data' may well take issue with her basic contention that we are far too illogical to be as predictable as economics would have us believe, but this work is to me one of those timely reminders that we need to keep asking questions about the 2008 GFC and its causes. We need to question the economic environment of which we are a part.

We need to stop accepting without question the theorising of economists as a valid representation of human behaviours at both the individuals level and en masse, and we need to ensure that we retain our critical thinking capacities, we need to 'keep our wits about us' in this far from logical world.

The translation from the swedish is at times clumsy and makes the book read less elegantly than I suspect it would have done in swedish, but at just short of 200 pages it is still eminently readable and engaging.

Thoroughly recommended.