Customer Reviews

On The Wealth of Nations: Books That Changed the World

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I should have been exposed to a reliable, useful exposition of Adam's Smith's ideas in my History, Political Science, and Economics classes. None of them did as good a job as O'Rourke has done, distilling 900 pages down. O'Rourke ties Smith to today's issues. So far I have given away copies of this book to government officials, teachers, and friends. Please do the same.

It is frightening to discover that so many politicians' proposed solutions to current problems have been tried and failed, with historical examples and explanations documented by Smith. Where is our sense of history! Smith offers not belief, but fact. We all want to solve society's problems, but the solutions ought not cause greater problems than they cure.

After I listened to the CDs, I bought hard copy to underline. Now I leave it on my iPod so when I shuffle, I get 3 minutes of pithy insight, interspersed with cleansing music. Put this on your permanent reading and rereading list.

Can be easy or hard to read depending on how one approaches it, wants to gain from it, and how much already knows about the subject. I found it interesting to learn that 200 year old ideas are still applicable. I read it nice and slow, savoring a maximum of one chapter at a time, and perhaps re-reading it later. Reading the original work is not a realistic possibility. So it is good to have a condensed version of Adam Smith's ideas.
I found PJ's writing style and humor to be so interesting that I have ordered his other older books.

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.

As an economics teacher, Adam Smith's "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" has long been on my "to read" list. I downloaded a free copy of it to my Kindle e-reader, but I haven't seriously considered opening it. I've read summaries of his ideas, perused his quotes and espoused his ideas in class, but I have not had the gumption to read 600 pages of 18th century prose.

When I discovered P.J. O'Rourke had written a commentary on the book I was thrilled. I do enjoy most of what O'Rourke writes and I figured his funny, insightful sarcastic take on things should do quite a bit to punch up a nearly 225 year-old economics text.

Let's start with the basics. Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a professor of both Moral Philosophy and Logic at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He wrote two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin Classics) (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776), often considered to be one of the first books on modern economics. Smith argued that freedom, both political and economic, was the ultimate source of happiness because the "invisible hand" of the free market would regulate the market and provide the best living for the most amount of people as possible. It is an interesting coincidence that the American Revolution and The Wealth of Nations both debuted in 1776.

I picked up P.J. O'Rourke's commentary on Smith's two books (the title and the cover do not tell the reader, but O'Rourke actually makes commentary on both books - he makes the compelling argument that they are really inter-related) and was expecting big things out of a very small book (242 pages including index, bibliography, endnotes and several pages of selected quotations).

Unfortunately, I did not get very big things. O'Rourke's pizazz and razzmatazz, his quick wit and his inclination to make a smart comment about everything - traits that can be very endearing and that I enjoyed very much in his book Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism got in the way big time. For example when discussing Smith's arguments about the value of importing goods and how free trade is a good thing. This is a controversial topic even now, more than 200 years later and O'Rourke adds nothing to it - in fact he hurts the argument by noting: "...imports are Christmas morning; exports are January's MasterCard bill." (p. 24)

If O'Rourke would have toned down the comments (Note: not eliminate, just tone down), this book would have been much more useful. As it was, I sometimes felt like I was reading Dave Barry's Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States. The attempt to leaven the dry nature of Smith's original work with jokes failed - I just had to work too hard to separate the facts from the jokes.

Did I learn enough about Smith and his thoughts to avoid that feeling of failure I get when I see "The Wealth of Nations" on my Kindle? Probably, so the book was not a complete failure. However, I feel like the book was a missed opportunity. The right man was picked to write this book, but he was allowed to play around a little too much.

I found this book both useful and entertaining. The summary of Smith's ideas was interesting for me as a non-economist and I also enjoyed Rourke's way of presenting those ideas. Of course this book would be disappointing for people who want to find an in-depth analysis of Smith's theories.

I've been aware of P.J. O'Rourke since his days at N. Lampoon and seen his work in Rolling
Stone so I assumed he was a leftist and having lost my earlier fascination with Communism, didn't read much of his work.
I began exploring the Wealth of Nations when I became aware, in 2008, of the folly that is the Federal Reserve System.
I have always assumed that the economy was a confidence game, as when people lost confidence in the economy that it would crash.
I didn't realize that it was a total con-job.
This was the first book I'd read by Mr. O'Rourke. I am now an avid fan.
The author is hilarious, making even the mundane and long winded treatment of real economics that Adam Smith explained, out load funny.
I was so impressed with this book that I've read many of the Authors earlier and recent works.
Mr. O'Rourke covers the The Wealth of Nations as seen from this side of the Keynesian debacle.
If you want a good review of the Wealth of Nations, without most of the extraneous material, coupled with laugh out loud satire of the current deviant financial system, then buy this book.
It is a serious book, on a serious subject and does convey the essences of Smiths life's work, but it does so in a humorous manner that goes a long way in re-popularizing Adam Smith's important work.

My sister got this book for me while in Orlando last year 2009. It was signed by O'Rourke. I guess she knows me well. I have always been a fan of Adam Smith and have even dove into The Wealth of Nations in my youth. It's like going into the Grand Canyon, to massive of a landscape. P.J. O'Rourke has made The Wealth of Nations a joy to comprehend, and it is so relevant to current history making times that this is a must read. P.J. O'Rourke filled my youth with laughter and my older age with knowledge. What an amazing ability.

As Thurber said (I think/paraphrase?) "Only humor can safely approach the burning column of truth" so it is possible that the ~180 pages of O'Rourke can safely approach the 900 pages of the Wealth Of Nations.

You will either "get it" or you won't but I doubt *you* will ever pack so much info as O'Rourke manages into so few words and paragraphs so entertainingly - this trick is *only* possible with humour.

Thus any sort of critique cannot approach these columns safely so let the man speak for himself!

<quote P19/20 of On The Wealth Of Nations>
...For example, a passage from the aforementioned digression on silver:
<Adam Smith>
Labour, it ust always be remembered, and not any particulare commodity or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities.6
<end of Adam Smith>
<quote continues>
This can be powerfully condensed: 'Labour... is the real measure of...value.' In quoting Adam Smith,'...'is sometimes the most trenchant thing he said. And it may be that just such a trenchant ellipsis in The Wealth Of Nations was what sent Karl Marx off his rocker. Notice, reading Smith's original sentence, that no grand Marxist 'value theory of labor' was created. The more so because, three hundred pages later, Smith makes the same kind of argument about food grains: 'The real value of every other commodity is finally measured and determined by ...the average money price of corn.'7 Smith thus maintains that work (or something akin to it, such as our daily bread) provides a sensible index for determining how much other things are worth to us. Deciding whether to mow the lawn ourselves or pay the kid next door to do it - factoring in the likelihood that he'll eat us out of house and home at snack time and run the Toro over his foot, sue us, and we'll have to get a second job to pay the legal bills - is something everybody does all the time. Marxism, as various Marxist regimes have discovered, is something nobody ever does if he can help it. (Incidentally, if the labor theory of value were true, certain children would be less worthless than they are.)
<end of quote p19/20 of O'Rourke On The WON>

PJ O'Rourke makes this Historical long winded Economics a fun read. They had a lot to say back then, and sometimes they understood it better than we do today, but reading through all the other dry junk would be a lot less fun without PJ.

P.J. O'Rourke has a reputation as a provocative satirist. The book jacket markets the book as "hilarious" and O'Rourke indicates that his job is to "make quips, jests, and waggish comments." However, O'Rourke is actually quite reverent of his subject and provides a thorough and thought provoking survey of Adam Smith's life works. The book weaves Wealth of nations together with other Smith works including Theory of Moral Sentiments, personal letters and other biographies into a coherent and comprehensive survey of Adam Smith. The book seems more like it was written by a serious biographer as opposed to a satirist. In fact, many of O'Rourke's quips and waggish comments seem out of place. I do not think Adam Smith should be judged as right or wrong. Although O'Rourke is a cheerleader for government laissez-faire in free markets, he superbly illuminated Smith as simply being a great thinker. I agree with other reviewers who have pointed out that there have been many text books and economic primers describing the ideas of Adam's Smith, but O'Rourke has done a better job than any of the others that I have read.

Possibly, one thing the book suffers from is bad timing. The book was written when America was in a love affair with free markets. At the time of release (2007), Adam Smith's tenets of self-interest and government laissez-faire were high fashion. Adam Smith was the champion of Neoliberalists, proponents of the market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on classical economic theories that stress the efficiency of liberalized trade and relatively open markets. Since the 1980s, there has been increased reliance upon the notion of the "self regulating" market as opposed to the preferences for government interventionism of the 1950s and 1960s. Through the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism seemed to make sense as economists based their theories of market self-corrections to `rational expectations.' To assume rational expectations is to assume that consumer's expectations may be individually wrong, but are correct on average and that errors are random. Unfortunately, America's love affair with free markets has swung like a pendulum and we have cooled off towards free market thinking since 2007. Even Alan Greenspan could not predict the stock market crash of October 1987, Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, and the subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007. During that time, Greenspan described investor behavior as "irrational exuberance." After his retirement from the Fed, Greenspan acknowledged during Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008 that he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation. He stated "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity -- myself especially -- are in a state of shocked disbelief." Apparently, just as the only certainty in life is uncertainty, the same can be said about the free markets.

Modern descriptions of the marketplace are prone to personification. Market analysis often sounds like psychoanalysis with language about stress, hopes, optimisms, depression, fear, anxiety and avoidance. Apparently, financial markets are given to mood swings like a twelve year old girl with a pimple. In fragile times that call for steady development, fragile and inconsistent markets can have brutal repercussions. Even a mild a panic or a flight to secure bonds may cause a drop in stocks that may lead to lay-offs, budget cuts and even bankruptcies. Obviously, for Smith and neoliberalists, these are evidence of the markets self-regulating itself. Unfortunately, for neoliberalists, there is no treatment to manage the swings. The absence of a centralized treatment certainly encourages a sense of `learned helplessness' among the citizenry in their respective pursuits of life, liberty and happiness.