As if being a businessman, novelist, tax collector, political commentator and spy wasn’t providing sufficient stimulus, Defoe was also an economist. This aspect of his life is even less well known than his spying. Unlike his novels, which include Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s main economic work in 1728, A Plan of the English Commerce (henceforth A Plan), is almost forgotten now. Daniel Defoe’s fictional hero, Robinson Crusoe, is often used by economics teachers as the pure example of ‘rational economic man’, the hero of neo-liberal free-market economics. The kind of economics that underpins Defoe’s Plan is exactly the opposite of Robinson Crusoe economics. In A Plan, Defoe clearly shows that it … Continue reading Ha-Joon Chang