None of My Business
by P.J. O'Rourke  (Author)

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 NY 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.

About this book
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.

Brief contents
Section I: How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other
    Introduction
    Lesson 1: The Power of the Economic Impulse
    Lesson 2: The Real Secret Behind All Investment Scams
    Lesson 3: (Topic for Discussion) If You Want Hard Money, How Hard Do You Have to Be to Get It?
Section II: Money and Banking
    Introduction
    The Strange, Shape-Shifting Symbol of Value
    My Own Personal Central Bank
    Negative Interest Rates—Not Only Wrong but Evil
    Debt Jubilee
Section III: Mutant Capitalism
    Introduction: The Mutants
    One Good Thing About Mutant Capitalists: They Aren’t Playing Monopoly
    What Are Corporations For?
Section IV: The Transition
    Introduction: The Digital Age and Which Digit It’s Giving Us
    A Brief History of Economic Transitions
    A Blockhead Confronts the Blockchain
    What’s the Connection?
    What Has the Digital Revolution Done to Print Media?
    Five Lessons About the Digital Economy from a Member of the Digital Generation
    Innovation—It’s All in Your Head
    Innovations That Get No Respect
    Unnovations
    Six Geniuses (Plus Some Cartoon Animators) Try to See into the Future
    A Ray of Hope in the Contest Between Man and Machine
Section V: Consumption
    Introduction: Some Thoughts on the History of Trade
    The Price of Being Middle Class
    Armchair Predictions About Consumer Trends
    Consumer Trends Among the “Grumpies”
    Consumer Trends Among the “Grumpies,” Part 2
    Summing Up American Consumer Trends …
    All the Money in the World
Section VI: Random Walk
    Introduction
    Five Things I Know About China
    Doubts About Asia
    Thoughts While Cleaning the Chicken Coop
    Six Lessons from a Man on Horseback
    Sympathy for the Devil
    Reform or Deform?
    Free-for-All!

Pages: 304 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (September 4, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802128483
ISBN-13: 978-0802128485