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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.153
EAN: 9780802143426
ISBN: 0802143423
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: December 21, 2007
Publisher: Grove Press
Studio: Grove Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In On The Wealth of Nations, America’s most provocative satirist, P. J. O’Rourke, reads Adam Smith’s revolutionary The Wealth of Nations so you don’t have to. Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes—including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page “digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the last four centuries,” which, “to those uninterested in the historiography of currency supply, is like reading Modern Maturity in Urdu.” Although daunting, Smith’s tome is still essential to understanding such current hot-topics as outsourcing, trade imbalances, and Angelina Jolie. In this hilarious, approachable, and insightful examination of Smith and his groundbreaking work, P. J. puts his trademark wit to good use, and shows us why Smith is still relevant, why what seems obvious now was once revolutionary, and why the pursuit of self-interest is so important.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I found P. J.s eating the rich hard reading. But his synopsis of the wealth of nations was spot on. Very readable book on a difficult subject.
Rating: -
I read this myself and have given it as a gift to my sons who are interested in economics. I don't know anyone who has read the entire Wealth of Nations and this short version is excellent -- it contains all the ideas, great humor, and is short. The Wealth of Nations is truly a book that changed the world, and this will enlighten anyone interested in economics and wants to understand the root of today's economics.
Rating:  -
I purchased this as a gift.
And the person who recieved it was very happy.
Rating:  -
Adam Smith was no fool, but O'Rourke is. Post bank-bailout, PJ's wit comes off as quite pathetic.
Smith was not afraid of contradiction. His great tome advocates free trade, but never expects it to be absolute, as some capitalists think it should be. And that's where the frustration sets in. O'Rourke obviously wrote this before the crash, so if he'd like to issue an apology, or remove his comical farce from circulation, that might be acceptable. For example, when Smith is trying to grapple with nuances of progressive taxation or privatization of government functions, O'Rourke makes blanket statements: "Everyone's confident in America except America's opinion-makers." He then mocks the trade deficit and the fact that our country doesn't really produce anything. I'd love to ask him if he thinks it's funny now.
Save yourself the trouble of slogging through O'Rourke's tangential fallacies and read the cliff notes instead.
Rating:  -
P J O'Rourke - he of Republican Party Reptile - is a gifted, witty and acerbic writer but one whose views, even when on his mettle, one should take wth a pinch of salt: more useful as an antidote to loony-tunes leftie thinking than as a properly constructive conservative alternative. As with all politically committed writers, left or right, his core analysis tends to be glib: the brushstrokes with which he paints the world are vigorous but, like many paintings that look good at a distance, they don't always bear close examination.
Expounding on Adam Smith's classic The Wealth of Nations, then, O'Rourke both is and isn't on home turf. *Is* in that, superficially, Smith is the godfather of O'Rourke's libertarian, optimistic, Republican brand of economics in observing that the natural opposition of interests of buyers and sellers is a functional tension such that folks left to their own devices will, quite without meaning to, generally act is a way which is constructive and efficient in its allocation of resources. *Isn't* in that O'Rourke is a journalist and a polemicist not an economist, much less a moral philosopher (though to give him credit he makes no bones whatever about that) and Smith's 900 page tome is a far more nuanced volume than its hackneyed headline about the invisible hand - which is all most of us know about it: hence O'Rourke's book - suggests.
To his credit, also, O'Rourke has also spent time assimlating Smith's companion (and much less well known) volume A Theory of Moral Sentiments, and does some good work to contextualise Wealth of Nations by reference to it.
All the same, O'Rourke's simplistic economic viewpoint - and sardonic air - remain untroubled by Smith's nuance, and at times this entry drifts closer to representing O'Rourke's own theory of the Wealth of Nations rather than considering Smith's. Most readers will have far less interest in that, no matter how funny it might be, particularly as O'Rourke has had a go at that book already, a decade ago, in Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics, and more particularly because on this outing O'Rourke's wit isn't as sharp, nor his insight as valuable, as it can be.
In any case you can be sure that P J O'Rourke wouldn't need 900 pages to expound his theory. You could write it on a cocktail napkin (Eat The Rich notwithstanding), and for all his praise of Adam Smith's pragmatism in the face of ideologically driven idealism (anachronistic though it may be, at the time of publication the dread socialism being still a good century and more hence) O'Rourke's laissez-faire view of the world is as idealistic as any, supposing as it does perfectly rational actors, a complete absence of government, ubiquity of perfect information and an omnipresent infinity of buyers and sellers, and (as we can now say in November 2008 with 20:20 hindsight) just as flawed: there are, we know know, times where even perfectly rational actors simply won't act and in these times the invisible hand without so much as a by-your-leave vanishes altogether and the only credible mechanic left to deal with the black swans carousing about is good old nanny state. And Warren Buffett.
This is by no means a bad book, and for those interested in a *somewhat* deeper reading of The Wealth Of Nations, more pleasant than the one that can be had by actually reading it, step forward - but bring that salt cellar. For this P J O'Rourke book more than any, you'll be needing it.
Olly Buxton
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