Reviews for Large and Small Holdings, a Study of English Agricultural Economics

The average rating for Large and Small Holdings, a Study of English Agricultural Economics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-12-23 00:00:00 Fichera Alfio I re-read this book about once every two years because it so amuses me. It's admitedly a bit out of date now. A lot changes in ten years. For one, it was written at the height of the stock market in the late 90's, but nevertheless his reflections remain basically true. (It was fun to read in the chapter on "Good Capitalism: Wall Street" his caveat "An investigation of money might as well begin where lots of money is being made -- for the moment, anyway...") This is a very funny book, but it's also an excellent layman's introduction to basic economics and basic economic systems. In Eat the Rich, O'Rourke explores the one fundamental question of economics: "Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?" He dismisses many of the typical explanations given for economic prosperity: brains (nope, "In Russia, where chess is a spectator sport, they're boiling stones for soup"); civilization (nope, the Chinese had civilization when O'Rourke's relatives were "hunkering naked in trees"); government (nope, "citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else" and with "no government at all" everyone's "naked in the trees."). So "why are some places wealthy and some places poor"? To find out, O'Rourke travels to Wall Street, Albania, Sweden, Cuba, Russia, Tanzania, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. His observations are sometimes enlightening and always amusing. As I'm re-reading it now, I'll note a few of my favorite observations: "We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Econ." "We artsy types would have been shocked if anyone had told us (and none had the nerve) that making money was creative. And we would have been truly shocked to learn that a fundamental principle of economics--'Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower- to higher-valued uses'--is the root of all creativity, be it artsy, IBMsy, or whatever." "[The textbook:] continues: 'Marx was wrong about many things...but that does not diminish his stature as an important economist.' Well, what would? If Marx was wrong about many things AND screwed the baby-sitter?" "Think of the stock market as an endless Gallup poll with 207 billion things that people can't make up their minds about."

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-25 00:00:00 Peter Fagan It’s my own fault, I should have stopped even earlier than I did, but there was something compulsively awful about this book. There are some things that are truly contemptible, like privileged and relatively intelligent people who assume a sort of corn-pone dumbness, and it seems to particularly affect the US right-wing. So why would anyone who pretended not to understand arithmetic write about economics in Eat the Rich? Well, because it isn’t so much about economics as it is an excuse for a diatribe about how much better the US of A’s “good capitalism” is than any other country’s system. To prove it, PJ takes a series of trips, with his smug US attitudes at full throttle, to so-called “good socialist” countries like Sweden (damned with the faint praise of someone who experiences a culture even slightly different from his own), Cuba (“bad socialist”; say no more, you know what that means), the “bad capitalist” Albania with its endemic corruption and poverty, and the aspiring capitalist Russia ... and manages a sneer at the varied successes (some magnificent, some baby steps) of every one of them. But what makes EtR so wearying to read is not the piffle and facile economics, but the incessant one-liners. Every line is a wisecrack. (Stupid word that, these are dumbcracks ... bad-a-boom! - and believe me, that one is better than 90% of PJ’s) I’m not entirely sure where the Eating part comes in, because I had to skip ever-increasing chunks and paused only when I noticed an egregiously appalling bit. But I suspect that it embodies the idea that Good Capitalism encourages the Rich to freely take what they want without any envy on our part, in the belief that the rest of us will somehow benefit. (Of course this was all before Good Capitalism showed its Albanian side in 2008, so perhaps PJ has changed his mind? Though I somehow think not) Well, if that isn’t the message, feel free to let me know, but you can’t make me read any more of this execrable rubbish.