Evolved Pirates

On my way to work last morning, I was confronted by one of those pleasant young men whose job it is to interest the paying public in pirated editions of the latest books. But the volume he thrust into the car wasn't the new instalment in the adventures of Harry Potter, or the prison-cell fiction of Jeffrey Archer, as you might expect. It was, instead, Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. Intrigued, I looked at the other books he carried in the crook of his arm. The first two on the pile were Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Well, well, I thought, what next? The Argumentative Indian? But no. The next volume he thrust towards me was Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist. Oh dear. So it wasn't some rogue economist moonlighting on the side after all...