Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776 and almost instantly it was recognized as the fundamental work of economics, as important to the development of this field as Darwin's The Origin of Species would be for natural history eighty years later. The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as being really long; the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes. And as P. J. O'Rourke points out, to understand The Wealth of Nations, you also need to read Smith's first doorstopper, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But now you don't have to read either. That's because P.J. has waded through all of Smith's dense work, including Wealth's sixty-seven-page "digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the four last centuries," which, says O'Rourke, "to those uninterested in the historiography of currency supply, is like reading Modern Maturity in Urdu." In this hilarious and insightful examination of Smith and his groundbreaking work, which even intellectuals should have no trouble comprehending, 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.

Reviews

"Unfortunately, Adam Smith didn't have graphs. Hundreds of pages of The Wealth of Nations that readers skim might have been condensed into several pages that readers skip entirely. Another thing Smith didn't have, besides graphs, was jargon. Economics was too new to have developed its thieves' cant. When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence. He had to go on talking through his hat until the subject was (and the reader would be) exhausted."