E-mail a friendP.J. O'Rourke
airdate February 5, 2007
P.J. O'Rourke is a leading political humorist and best-selling author of 11 books. He's written for such diverse publications as Esquire, Car and Driver, Rolling Stone and The National Lampoon, where he became editor in chief, and his books have been translated into a dozen languages. O'Rourke became a writer after college, starting his career on small newspapers in Manhattan and Baltimore. In his latest book, On the Wealth of Nations, he offers his witty insight on free-market economics.
P.J. O'Rourke
Tavis: Pleased to welcome “New York Times” best-selling author P.J. O'Rourke to this program. P.J. somehow got the call to write the first of 10 books about 10 books that changed the world in which we live. The first book that they're focusing in on is the classic by Adam Smith called “The Wealth of Nations.” And so P.J. aptly titles his book about “The Wealth of Nations,” “On the Wealth of Nations: Books That Changed the World.” (Laugh) P.J., of course, writes for “The Atlantic Monthly” and “The Weekly Standard.”
P.J. O’Rourke: “Weekly Standard.”
Tavis: Nice to have you on the program, P.J.
O’Rourke: Hey, thank you.
Tavis: Good to see you. Ten books that changed the world. We start with Adam Smith’s classic text, “The Wealth of Nations.” This is a book written back in the 1700s.
O’Rourke: It came out, coincidentally, in 1776. Same as us.
Tavis: Not a bad year, yeah.
O’Rourke: Not a bad year.
Tavis: Yeah. Nine hundred pages it was then.
O’Rourke: And still is (laugh).
Tavis: Yeah (laugh).
O’Rourke: Let me tell you.
Tavis: I'm looking at this. Yours, not quite 900 pages.
O’Rourke: No, no, but honest to gosh, I read all 900 pages. And the thing about it that I found out once I started this was you have to read the book he wrote before this. Another 400 pages, “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” to really understand what he’s doing in “The Wealth of Nations.” So, it didn’t take me that long to write this book, but the reading took me a year and a half.
Tavis: Before I get specifically into your task to write about “The Wealth of Nations,” tell me more about this project. I've been fascinated by this notion of picking 10 books that changed our world.
O’Rourke: Well, actually, I think it’s probably gonna be open-ended in the end. I don't know how many there’ll be.
Tavis: Maybe more than 10.
O’Rourke: May well be.
Tavis: Okay.
O’Rourke: A guy named Toby Mundy, who runs Grove Atlantic’s England division, came up with this idea. And he was thinking gosh, there are these huge books that changed the world, changed people’s minds, made people think differently about things. So let’s get people in who know about the subject or something, have something to say about the subject, and have them read these books basically for us. This is “Cliff Notes” for grownups, really, is a little bit of what it is.
Tavis: Speaking of which, for those who have never heard of “The Wealth of Nations,” much less will ever get through the 900 pages that make up this polemic, tell me, before we get into your book about it, what “The Wealth of Nations,” what was Smith trying to say?
O’Rourke: Adam Smith was the first economist, really. He is the guy who laid the groundwork for all modern economics. He was the first person to take how the economy works and make it systematic. Boil it down, figure it out, and also to show how it is that an economy grows. Why it just doesn’t stay where it is. And that is the basis of pretty much everything that has happened since 1776.
The intellectual basis. Obviously, he didn’t invent the light bulb or the car or anything. But he laid down the groundwork. And the core of this 900 pages is he said that it’s three things. We depend upon three things. Pursuit of individual self-interests. That people should go and take care of themselves. Division of labor, what we’d call specialization.
That people need to learn different things and split things up. And freedom of trade. That you and I should be free to work up the goods and services that we produce, and exchange them with each other. And those three things are what makes an economy grow.
Tavis: And from his text came what? So he lays out this framework for how we ought to build and create a society where economics is concerned. It turned into what?
O’Rourke: Well, it made people understand, for instance, that the wealth of a nation was not the king’s treasure piled up in the castle. Smith said, “No, no, the way you measure wealth of a nation is you measure it in terms of all the trade that takes place in goods and services in the whole country.” So he invented gross domestic product.
No gross domestic product, the economists have got nothing to say. They’ve just gotta stand around mute in ugly neckties. And he also was the first person to really make people understand that money has a variation in its value. People used to think gold was worth its weight in gold. Smith said, “Well, yeah, it’s worth its weight in gold, but it’s not necessarily worth the same amount of wheat this year as it’s gonna be worth next year.”
He said that “The measurement of wealth is fluid, and so is the measurement that we use, money”. So he said, “You can’t think of money as being zero sums.” He said, “The idea here is we can make more wealth.” If I have too many pizza slices, you don't have to eat the Domino’s box. That’s the key message of Adam Smith.
Tavis: Help me and those watching understand why this book is picked as one of the 10 books that changed the world. What I'm getting at is, in my everyday life, why do I owe a shout-out to Adam Smith?
O’Rourke: Well, because up until Adam Smith, there was a great deal of confusion about how countries got wealth, and a great deal of confusion about freedom. Interesting thing about “The Wealth of Nations,” it’s based on individual freedom, liberty, and equality. Smith is saying that we all have to be free. Free from interference by rich people, free from interference by religious nuts, free from interference by the government, to do what we do best and exchange it with each other.
And, we all have to be equal before the law, or this freedom is meaningless. And he comes up with an explanation for equality that is pretty cool. He doesn’t go into idealism. He doesn’t go into fraternal love. He said, “Why are we all equal? We’re all equal because man, the most powerful animal ever to stride the Earth, is also the most helpless.”
Pathetic, helpless. We are born completely incapable of taking care of ourselves. We remain incapable of taking care of ourselves until, well, to judge by today’s youth, until we’re 40 or so. And this was an eye-opener to a world that really had been, in many ways, feudal. A few people owned all the land, and owned some of us, too. And we were beholden to them for everything that we did. And Smith said, “If you want a rich world, that’s not how it works.”
Tavis: There’s a particular irony right now, P.J., that grabs me. So Smith makes the argument that we are all equal for the reasons that you’ve just explained, and yet, as you and I both know, we were not all equal. Certainly those who had melanin in their skin, who looked like me, were not all equal. And the first irony is that the folk who look like me, my ancestors, are the engine that drive this economy.
So, Smith writes brilliantly about the kind of country America needs to be and should be if we’re gonna thrive economically, and yet the chattel that drive that industry happen to be my ancestors. That’s the first irony. So they're not all equal. The second irony is that while we are now looking back on these books that change the world, this just happens to be ... his book comes out in 1776. Fast-forward to 2007. This year is the four hundredth anniversary, as you know, of the Jamestown settlement.
O’Rourke: That’s right.
Tavis: The first experiment in Democracy in America, the first place the Africans first arrived. I'm trying to get a sense, then, with all that said, of whether this brilliant economist had anything to say about subjects other than the sheer numbers here.
O’Rourke: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. See, the thing is-
Tavis: 'Cause we’re not all equal.
O’Rourke: The thing about Adam Smith was first and foremost, he was a moral philosopher. He didn’t think of himself as an economist. Being the first one, there wasn’t a field to say that he was in. He was the field. He had a whole project. He was going to write a book about our moral life. That’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” And then about our material life. That’s “The Wealth of Nations.”
And of course he knew that in reality, we were not all equal. But he said, “If you want the good life,” he said it first in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” If you want the good life inside yourself, the moral and ethical person, you’ve got to make everybody equal. Then he said, “If you want the material good life, if everybody wants to lead the good life or at least have the opportunity to lead the good life, you have got to make everybody equal, because we are dependent upon each other.”
He wasn’t pretending that people were equal, he was a realistic guy. He lived in the real world. What surprised me about this book, I always thought capitalism was okay, 'cause it seemed to work better. I've been to Capitalist countries, and I've been to Socialist countries, and Capitalist countries, we have more stuff (laugh). We win.
But what I didn’t realize until I read Adam Smith was the moral foundation for these free markets. Not capitalism, per se, but for these freedom of markets. Our freedom to learn what we wanna learn, our freedom to be what we wanna be, our freedom to exchange things with other people. That these have a moral basis, it’s not just a practical thing.
Tavis: How do we, how do you, how does P.J., when all is said and done, look back at what Smith said, and in fact was trying to say, and then juxtapose that with what happened? That is to say now to your point of capitalism, I've said any number of times that I like capitalism, too. I own a business. The only thing wrong with it that I'm prepared to admit is that too many folk ... too few people get the capital, and the rest of us get the ism. (Laugh)
The racism, the sexism, the cronyism, the good old boy-ism. So Smith starts out arguing that here’s the way that you ought to structure your society if we’re all going to be equal. And yet, what we have is the absolute, exact opposite. It couldn’t be any more imbalanced where economies of scale are concerned. What do we say about that?
O’Rourke: Smith knew that there would always be huge inequities in the society. But he said “First place, don't misunderstand these inequities.” Don't think that ... it may be bad that somebody is really poor down here in the wake of Katrina, and then there’s Donald Trump out here on the golf course. It offends us. But don't think that the Donald Trump money over there was taken from the person.
He said, “It isn't a zero-sum game. What makes things better for you does not necessarily make them worse for me.” They do if you steal something, but not if you build a business. When you're building your business, I may stay poor and you may get rich, but you didn’t take that money from me. You made that money. You created that money.
And then Smith also wanted us to be careful about equality in this sense. He said, “Yeah, you can level the world.” They tried that in Russia, they tried that in Mao’s China. But you gotta be careful that the cure isn't worse than the disease, you know what I mean? Think of the enormous political power. And when it comes to political power, of course, political power is zero sum.
When I had political power, I did take it from you. 'Cause there's only so much power. Whereas there’s an infinite amount of money.
Tavis: It is fascinating to me how, when you get your brain wrapped around a book that in fact has changed the world, a book like “The Wealth of Nations,” you see how far as a country we have come, and you see how far as a country we have not come. That said, the new book by “New York Times” perennial best seller, P.J. O'Rourke, is “On the Wealth of Nations,” one of a series of books that changed the world.
And I'm sure we’ll get a change to talk about some of the others, perhaps, on this program in the future. But P.J. O'Rourke is up first, and P.J., nice to have you on the program.
O’Rourke: Hey, thank you for having me here.
Tavis: Glad to have you. P.J. talked earlier about economists standing around with ugly neckties on. Mine is not ugly. (Laugh) Jonathan, you got this? Isn't that a beautiful necktie? This is an absolutely-
O’Rourke: It is today.
Tavis: -gorgeous and beautiful necktie, because my hometown team, the Indianapolis Colts, are the Super Bowl champions. And just wanted you all to ... for those who hadn’t peeped that out ... to notice my necktie tonight. That said, up next on this program, Tony-winning singer Audra McDonald. Stay with us.
Back to February 5, 2007