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

Narrated by: Johnny Heller

After decades covering war and disaster, best-selling author and acclaimed satirist P. J. O'Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet: business, investment, finance, and the political chicanery behind them.

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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 percent 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 "[L]ike 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 P. J. wakes up and finds that all the world's goods and services are free!

This is P. J. at his finest, an audiobook not to be missed.

©2018 P. J. O’Rourke (P)2018 HighBridge Company

Enjoyable

Clean humor is a rare pleasure. This author brings it home. The author is more conservative than liberal Disagree with him on the necessity of minimum wage. Specious argument about why not set the minimum wage to $500 per hour. Easy to take something to a logical extreme and then attack that as being ridiculous. Other than that couldn’t find much wrong with his thinking. The author is so well read and travelled. This book is a lot of fun

Would be better if read by PJ

Story was good, I’ve been a fan of PJ since the 90’s; but disappointed that he didn’t narrate the story.

Another great book by P.J.

I've been a fan of P.J. O'Rourke since his days at National Lampoon. Although my politics are a bit left of center, O'Rourke is so funny and such a great down-to-earth storyteller that I truly enjoy hearing a slightly different point of view. In addition, he is proof that great humor is the ultimate way to communicate. Fantastic, funny, and thought provoking from start to finish.

A Dated Perspective

While I love that the author's point of view is grounded in vast international experience, I couldn't help but feel like it glossed over the most important elements of the digital age.

I agree that government is always evil, a necessary evil due to the failing of markets. This author does not take much interest in diving into the effects of the machine learning era. He simply chalks up the shifting employment landscape to globalization and the softmindedness (education?) of millenials. Couldn't it be that automation creates a market failure where people can't just 'get a job' anymore?

Save yourself.

Listening to this book was like listening to a six hour Andy Rooney segment. Mildly amusing a few times. Definitely regret listening to it.