ON THE WEALTH OF NATIONS P.J. O’Rourke (Atlantic monthly press)
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By comparison, P.J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations, the first volume in the new Atlantic Monthly Press series “Books That Changed the World,” runs a brisk 256 pages and weighs a feathery 12 ounces. The organizing principle is simple: O’Rourke reads Adam Smith so you don’t have to, summarizing the salient points, surveying his influence, and considering pertinent biographical data in such a way as to make the whole enterprise more entertaining than an economics homework assignment.
He doesn’t waste any time in pointing out that Smith published The Wealth of Nations “with neat coincidence, in the very year that history’s greatest capitalist nation declared its independence.” And he’s all too delighted to point to Smith’s bona fides as a free-trade maverick, swimming against the regulatory tide of his times. The Wealth of Nations is, to O’Rourke, a “nine-hundred-page indictment of the mercantile system,” the cumbersome fog of tax and trade tariffs that served as “the dominant economic theory of his day.” Which is, of course, music to the ears of a conservative looking to find intellectual backing for his own free-trade arguments.
As intellectual compromises go, you could do a lot worse than this book-length book report, especially given that the real choice for most people is between reading it or never considering Adam Smith’s bilious tome at all. It whetted my appetite for the next books in the series: one on the Koran, by Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, is already in stores, and another on Darwin’s legendarily dry Origin of the Species is due in March. Now if only somebody would do Gravity’s Rainbow.
