O'Rourke's take on outsourcing bears repeating: "Some jobs require protection, to ensure they are performed locally in their own communities. My job is to make quips, jests, and waggish comments.

Somewhere in Mumbai there is a younger, funnier person who is willing to work for less. My job could be outsourced to him. But he could make any joke he wanted. Who would my wife scold? Who would my in-laws be offended by? Who would my friends shun?"

Or on the emergence of the service economy: "Later economists, such as, in the early nineteenth century, J. B. Say, felt that Smith undervalued the economic contributions of services. And he did. The eighteenth century had servants, not a service economy. It was hard for a man of that era to believe that the semiinebriated footman and the blowzy scullery maid would evolve into, well, the stoned pizza delivery boy and the girl behind the checkout counter with an earring in her tongue."

If you read one book about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations this year. . .