Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, [amazon_link id=”0718197038″ target=”_blank” ]Economics: The User’s Guide[/amazon_link], is sitting enticingly on my desk. It starts: “Why are people not very interested in economics?” A false premise surely? All the evidence from rising student numbers to popular economics book sales (not to mention the Piketty phenomenon) is that people are *hugely* interested in economics. And a good thing too – far too important to be left to us economists.

[amazon_image id=”0718197038″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics: The User’s Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)[/amazon_image]

I was disappointed by his column with Jonathan Aldred in last Sunday’s paper, which pretends that it’s only a beleaguered but wise minority of economists who want to see curriculum change, and dismisses the CORE curriculum that’s under development without – on the internal evidence of the column – having looked at it. Calls for radical reform make for good newspaper copy but ignore the practicalities of achieving change. It would be a shame if the real momentum behind curriculum reform got dissipated because of ill-informed comment from people who should be supporting it. Still, it’s the prerogative of would-be revolutionaries to be idealistic/unrealistic. Here is my VoxEU column, trying to be balanced about the curriculum debate.

Paging through the new book, though, it looks very good. It’s one of the launch titles in the new Pelican series. And at £7.99, about the same price adjusted for inflation as my 1970s were £1.95 Pelicans.