Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, believed that our actions stem from self-interest and the world turns because of financial gain. But every night Adam Smith's mother served him his dinner, not out of self-interest but out of love.Today, economics focuses on self-interest and excludes our other motivations. It disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking and its influence has spread from the market to how we shop, think and date. In this engaging takedown of the economics that has failed us, Katrine Marcal journeys from Adam Smith's dinner table to the recent financial crisis and shows us how different, how much better, things could be.

Auteur
Katrine Marçal is a correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. On publication in Sweden, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner was shortlisted for The August Prize and won the Lagercrantzen Award. She lives in Hertfordshire. Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission, her debut novel, about love, loss and BDSM, was published in four languages in 2019. She has translated leading Swedish authors such as Lina Wolff, Karolina Ramqvist, Johannes Anyuru, and Katrine Marcal, whose Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? is published by Portobello Books. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Guernica, the White Review, the Offing, Paris Review Daily, LitHub and Two Lines. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine's publicist.