On The Wealth of Nations

A New York Times Bestseller



As P. J. O'Rourke says, 'It's as if Smith, having proved that we can all have more money, then went on to prove that money doesn't buy happiness. And it doesn't. It rents it.'





Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776 and almost instantly was recognized as fundamental to an understanding of economics. It was also recognized as being really long and as P. J. O'Rourke points out, to understand The Wealth of Nations, the cornerstone of free-market thinking and a book that shapes the world to this day, you also need to peruse Smith's earlier doorstopper,The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But now you don't have to read either, because P. J. has done it for you.





In this hilarious work P. J. shows us why Smith is still relevant, why what seems obvious now was once revolutionary, and how the division of labour, freedom of trade and pursuit of self-interest espoused by Smith are not only vital to the welfare of mankind, they're funny too. He goes on to establish that far from being an avatar of capitalism, Smith was actually a moralist of liberty. As P. J. says, 'It's as if Smith, having proved that we can all have more money, then went on to prove that money doesn't buy happiness. And it doesn't. It rents it.'



P. J. O'Rourke wrote more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He was a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panellist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. Long a resident of rural New England, as far away from the things he wrote about as he could get, he died in 2022 at the age of 74.