When Pam Woodall, then economics editor at The Economist, decided in 1986 that a hamburger might explain something serious about the global monetary order, she was not, one suspects, expecting the thing to outlive four decades of floating currencies, three financial crises, and the arrival of an entire generation of readers who have never once folded a printed edition of the paper. Yet here we are.

When Pam Woodall, then economics editor at The Economist, decided in 1986 that a hamburger might explain something serious about the global monetary order, she was not, one…

It highlights economic problems—and helps explain how to solve them