Eat the rich: Grilled, fried or raw?
We begin a series on 'interesting' booksintelligent and thought-provoking, but also enjoyable, with 'Eat The Rich' by P.J. O'Rourke
“I had one fundamental question about economics: Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck? It’s not a matter of brains. No part of the earth... is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they’re boiling stones for soup. Nor can education be the reason. Fourth graders in the American school system know what a condom is but aren’t sure about 9 x 7. Natural resources aren’t the answer. Africa has diamonds, gold, uranium, you name it. Scandinavia has little and is frozen besides. Maybe culture is the key, but wealthy regions such as the local mall are famous for lacking it.”
Thus begins American libertarian (and bitingly funny) journalist P.J. O’Rourke’s 1998 book Eat The Rich: A Treatise on Economics. For those who haven’t read O’Rourke—or haven’t heard of him—the titles of three of his books will suffice: Give War A Chance, Parliament of Whores and Don’t Vote!—It Just Encourages The Bastards.
You get the idea. Cynical, iconoclastic, doesn’t mince words, doesn’t give a damn about “good taste”.
Oh, and one of his early pieces was titled How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.
So, in the mid-1990s, after a decade of reporting from the world’s trouble spots (Holidays In Hell), O’Rourke decided to figure out what this whole thingumajig called economics was. The quote that appears on the first page of Eat The Rich is from Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater: “In this state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, turned my attention to political economy.”
O’Rourke took his project seriously. He tried to read up on the subject, all the classic texts—Adam Smith, Keynes, Samuelson. Unfortunately, he made little progress, and kept falling asleep while trying to penetrate prose that he found turgid and tedious.
So, he decided to travel around the world and attempt to figure out why some economies worked and others didn’t: “free market, socialist, and systems nobody could figure out... I’d wander around, gape at things, and simply ask people...”
What he observed on the ground led him to classify economies into four basic categories: Good Capitalism (the US—even though what he saw on Wall Street “terrified” him), Bad Capitalism (Albania), Good Socialism (Sweden) and Bad Socialism (Cuba).
Eat The Rich also has chapters on Russia—“How (Or How Not) To Reform (Maybe) An Economy (If There Is One)”; Tanzania—“How To Make Nothing Out Of Everything”; Hong Kong—“How To Make Everything Out Of Nothing”; and Shanghai—“How To Have The Worst Of Both Worlds”.
(Note: Many of these economies are very different today from what O’Rourke saw in the late 1990s.)
The New York Times gave Eat The Rich a rather negative review. But it was written by an economist, and O’Rourke is, throughout, contemptuous of economists—he stops just short of labelling them as wankers. This particular economist, one Peter Passell, also seems to have approached the book as he would a PhD thesis. “Alas,” he complains, “the pay-off to readers craving fresh insight into the core issues of economics is very modest.”
Passell misses the pleasures and insights of Eat The Rich by several miles from at least two directions.
One, O’Rourke is a superb reporter. Much of the joy of reading Eat The Rich comes from the writer’s keen observation and the ability to put it all down in caustic prose.
Here’s Shanghai in 1997: “There was so much scaffolding in Shanghai that when I saw a framework of bamboo poles holding nets over a sapling, I thought, ‘Christ, they’re building trees.’ Actually not. Miles of once-shady streets have been timbered to make way for steel and glass. Although new trees were being planted. I counted a dozen. And at least two parks hadn’t been completely paved. Not that Shanghai has turned its back on nature. The downtown freeway overpasses, stacked four deep, had little flowering window boxes hanging from their guardrails.”
Moscow in 1996: “I visited a radio station on election night, a radio station still using vacuum tubes in its broadcast equipment. There was a Toshiba laptop in the studio. And this ordinary piece of journalistic equipment was alarming. The laptop, with its crisp design and neat finish, made the whole building look like it had been built by apes. Apes on the take. The place was no more than fifteen years old and the plastic was flaking, the floor tiles were buckling, the walls were crooked, the windows didn’t fit... You could break down the doors with a blunt remark. And there, on a wobbly table with a veneer top wrinkled like a relief map of the Urals, sat the little Toshiba, doing the one thing that nothing made in the Soviet Union ever seemed to do. It worked.”
If you need just one reason—and I can list many—to read Eat The Rich, it is the sheer quality of reportage and writing.
Two, the NYT reviewer doesn’t seem to have read the last chapter of the book, which has no trace of humour or sarcasm, but a thoughtful essay on economic justice and how to measure it. “Per-capita GDP is a tricky figure and doesn’t tell us much about the well-being of individual people. But there are other statistics that don’t present the same problems of averaging. Life-expectancy and infant-mortality rates do tell us how things are going for ordinary folks. No matter how rich a nation’s elite, its members aren’t going to live to be 250 and wildly skew the numbers. And a country can’t fake a low infant-mortality rate by getting a few rich babies to live while letting all the poor babies die.”
This is exactly the foundational logic of Amartya Sen’s work, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1998. O’Rourke hadn’t read Sen; he reached his conclusions based on what he saw on his travels and poring over economic numbers.
Eat The Rich ends with an angry lament: “Poverty is hard, wretched, humiliating... But what poverty is not is sad. Poverty is infuriating. These things don’t need to happen. These conditions don’t need to exist. We can’t solve all the problems of life, but we can solve the problem of gross, worldwide material deprivation... We know how to get rid of poverty. We know how to create wealth. But because of laziness, fear, complacency, love of power, or foolish idealism, we refuse to do it.”
Like all great satirists, from Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain to Charlie Chaplin, there beats an impassioned heart inside Patrick Jake O’Rourke. He tries hard to hide it beneath a nihilistic shell, but he fails.
That’s why you should read Eat The Rich.
Sandipan Deb is the editorial director of swarajyamag.com
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First Published:4 Jun 2016, 11:25 PM IST
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