photo taken by Kim Traynor and cropped as shown above, image governed by creative commons BY-share alike 3.0 license
A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent the last several months reading [An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the] Wealth of Nations. He had doggedly spent session after session with the book, reading it during the intervals while he was sitting, waiting during swim team practice for his kid. It struck me as a pretty audacious, I presumed that it would be pitched at a level over our heads. Intrigued, I though I might give it a go. Why not? If it turned out to be insufferably technical, then I could drop it and move on to something else.
I would love to rant on about how wonderful this work is, and it is good. Parts of it are excellent, whereas others are as dry as a poorly baked Thanksgiving turkey (and about as difficult to ingest) . It reminds me a little bit of something that I heard about Moby Dick where there were people who were considered scholars of the work, who yet had not read every single word (apparently it is not frowned upon to skip the nearly endless descriptions of the bibliographical classification of whales that forms much of the middle of Moby Dick). I mean, I’m sure that people read Wealth of Nations, but I don’t think that many actually read each part… save except for my newly educated amateur economist cum swim team practice buddy.
And after working through Book 1, I’m going to take a breather before I go back for seconds with Books 2 – 5. I might be full already.