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The Cato Institute offers lots of great Christmas gifts — Pocket Constitutions (also a good gift for Bill of Rights Day!), books, apparel, even Cato-branded Lands’ End merchandise. But I have my own holiday recommendations that I’ve made before.
I decided one year to give a young colleague a post-graduate course in political science and economics — P. J. O’Rourke’s books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich.
So I went to my local Barnes & Noble to search for them. Not in
Current Affairs. Not in Economics. No separate section called Politics. I
decided to try Borders (RIP). But first — to avoid yet more driving
around — I went online to see if my local Borders stores had them in
stock. Sure enough, they did, in a couple of stores just blocks from the
Cato Institute. Checking to see where in the store I would find them, I
discovered that they would both be shelved under “Humor–Humorous
Writing.” Oh, right, I thought, they’re not books on economics or
current affairs, they’re humor.
Yes, P.J. is one of the funniest writers around. But what people
often miss when they talk about his humor is what a good reporter and
what an insightful analyst he is. Parliament of Whores is a
very funny book, but it’s also a very perceptive analysis of politics in
a modern mixed-economy democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich,
you’ll learn more about how countries get rich — and why they don’t —
than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I’ve decided
that the best answer to the question “What’s the best book to start
learning economics?” is Eat the Rich.
On page 1, P. J. starts with the right question: “Why do some places
prosper and thrive while others just suck?” Supply-and-demand curves are
all well and good, but what we really want to know is how not to be
mired in poverty. He writes that he tried returning to his college
economics texts but quickly remembered why he hated them at the
time–though he does attempt, for instance, to explain comparative
advantage in terms of John Grisham and Courtney Love. Instead he decided
to visit economically successful and unsuccessful societies and try to
figure out what makes them work or not work. So he headed off to Sweden,
Hong Kong, Albania, Cuba, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Wall Street.
In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the
appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and he
gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is
actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life
expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot
better than humans in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes,
the real answer is the collective “ujamaa” policies pursued by the sainted post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is “ujaama—they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy.”
From Tanzania P. J. moves on to Hong Kong, where he finds “the best
contemporary example of laissez-faire….The British colonial government
turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.”
You could do worse than to take a semester-long course on political economy where the texts are Eat the Rich and Parliament of Whores.
So, bookstore owners, leave them in the Humorous Writing section for
sure, but also put copies in the Economics, Politics, and Current
Affairs sections.
Still time to buy them for Christmas and educate all your family and friends while they think they’re just being entertained!
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