None of My Business: P.J. Explains Money, Banking, Debt, Equity, Assets, Liabilities, and Why He's Not Rich and Neither Are You

by P. J. O'Rourke

Overview

After decades covering war and disaster, bestselling author and acclaimed satirist P. J. O’Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet—business, investment, finance, and the political chicanery behind them.

Want to get rich overnight for free in 3 easy steps with no risk? Then don’t buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there’s a book that can do that, you shouldn’t buy any books because you probably can’t read.) P.J.’s approach to business, investment, and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter “How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other.” He proposes “A Way to Raise Taxes That We’ll All Love”—a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high tech innovation with a chapter on “Unnovations,” which asks, “The Internet—whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?” He misunderstands bitcoin, which seems “like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club.” He closes with a fanciful short story about the morning that P.J. wakes up and finds that all the world’s goods and services are free! This is P.J. at his finest, a book not to be missed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802128485
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

P. J. O’Rourke has written nineteen 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 is a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. He lives in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.

Read an Excerpt

From None of My Business:

“Many ‘classical liberal’ and libertarian economists are skeptical about the Central Banks that issue fiat money. Not me. I like them. I want one. Of course I don’t want an enormous Central Bank like the Federal Reserve. Where would I put it? No, what I want is a small, handy ‘Central Bank of O’Rourke’ that would fit in the laundry room or in the mudroom between the dog kennels.”

“We’d like someone to develop an app that gets rid of all apps, a no-app app, call it a ‘napp.’”

“Crypto-currency adds a kind of unwelcome mysticism to the already baffling material and philosophical aspects of money. Some regard the blockchain with almost religious awe, as if it were the work of mythical ‘Geek Gods’ high upon Mount Laptopus.”

Editorial Reviews

07/09/2018
O’Rourke (What the Hell Just Happened?), a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, omits nothing in his manic commentary on the state of consumerism, economics, and technology amid the ongoing “digital revolution,” ornamented with wry anecdotes from his journalistic career and personal life. Remembering his time reporting on war-torn 1990s Somalia, he muses, “Maybe one way to understand currency collapse is to go someplace where society has collapsed already”; in an equally insightful, albeit dramatically different moment, he solicits opinions about popular apps from his teenage daughter, “a one-girl focus group sitting right across the breakfast table, so deeply involved in the digital economy that her hair was dragging in her nut butter and chia seed toast.” Himself unimpressed with most modern innovations, he pinpoints “unnovations,” including texting and PowerPoint, he would erase if he could. In a different vein, a recollection of cleaning out his rural New England home’s chicken coop leads to a reconsideration of the phrase, “I’d rather be shoveling shit in hell,” and a (measured) new appreciation for the value of manual labor. While choppy and unfocused at times, the book makes a good case for humor’s helpfulness in confronting the modern world’s ever-present absurdities. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for None of My Business

"[O'Rourke] has a razor-sharp intellect, and he writes without a shred of pretension or pontification. Another winner from an A-list humorist."—Booklist

Praise for P. J. O’Rourke:

“The funniest writer in America.”—Wall Street Journal

“Whether you agree with him or not, P.J. writes a helluva piece.”—Richard Nixon

“P.J. O’Rourke is like S.J. Perelman on acid.”—Chris Buckley

“Shakespeare, Hemingway, they’re okay, I guess, but my next guest—he’s better . . . . [P. J. O’Rourke’s] writing really changed my life.”—Greg Gutfeld

“If [O’Rourke’s] wry essays have a mission statement . . . it’s this: Starchy Republicanism is really, really fun.”—New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2018-06-27
Noted wisenheimer O'Rourke (How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016, 2017, etc.) serves up a fan's notes on "a blood sport that I greatly enjoy"—namely, the dismal science of economics.Though a conservative on numerous mastheads and TV credits since the heyday of National Lampoon, the author isn't reflexive in his cheerleading for capitalism; after all, he notes, it was capitalists who "hoovered my investment portfolio in the 2008 financial crisis." Still, this is a mostly pro-free-market, conservative look at a complex subject that O'Rourke sometimes reduces to useful fundamentals—and that sometimes floats away on clouds of dumb abstraction. As to the former, the author points to the thought that the first thing a financial analyst needs to do is figure out how a company he or she is thinking of investing in makes money. In the instance of Enron, one mogul's staff reported back that they were "utterly ignorant" even after studying the company up close for a month—a lesson, O'Rourke suggests, in the virtues of ignorance, or at least not proceeding until one is less ignorant than at the start. Where things get interesting is when the author turns subtly critical in the matter of corporations. As he notes, things got sticky in the financial realm when the banks sold themselves out to "clueless stockholders," since the banks could then be comfortably managed by people who were clueless themselves. Of course, the whole business of corporate personhood is sticky. As for fundamentals, the author scores points with a sharp observation: The rise of credit cards suggests that the idea that goods and services seem sort of free if you don't have to pay straightaway yields a topsy-turvy financial world, one whose craziness can logically be resolved only with the use of a "9mm Glock—VISA card of the future."As with most of O'Rourke's books, a mix of the smart and the throwaway but fairly entertaining throughout.

Kirkus Reviews