I thought this was another book along the lines of "Freakonomics," "Naked Economics," or "Predictably Irrational," where the goal was to showcase a slew of counter-intuitive insights from economics and psychology -- the "Economics Can Be Fun" genre, if you will.



Not so. Though I got a lot out of this book, and parts of it made me think, on the whole I would characterize it as stuffy and uncomfortably theoretical.



It's philosophy, really. It's really a survey of how two ideas -- capitalism and democracy -- have been viewed over the years. It examines the ways in which, to paraphrase the first line of the book, capitalism has gotten a worse rap than it deserves, while democracy has gotten a better one than it deserves. (At the hands of poets, historians, novelists, politicians, etc.) It's almost literary history.



So a lukewarm recommendation for this one. There were parts that made me think, but now that I think about it, even those parts were really the author's quoting somebody else's ideas (quite a lot of this here), than coming up with anything original. On the whole, I'd say it's a lot less fun than the groovy cover and loony title seem to promise.