IT WAS HORRIBLY unfair: a public resource—all the fish in the Icelandic sea—was simply turned over to a handful of lucky Icelanders. Overnight, Iceland had its first billionaires, and they were all fishermen. But as social policy it was ingenious: in a single stroke the fish became a source of real, sustainable wealth rather than shaky sustenance. Fewer people were spending less effort catching more or less precisely the right number of fish to maximize the long-term value of Iceland’s fishing grounds. The new wealth transformed Iceland—and turned it from the backwater it had been for 1,100 years to the place that spawned Björk. If Iceland has become famous for its musicians it’s because Icelanders now have time to play music, and much else. Iceland’s youth are paid to study abroad, for instance, and encouraged to cultivate themselves in all sorts of interesting ways. Since its fishing policy transformed Iceland, the place has become, in effect, a machine for turning cod into PhDs.

Today's book is Boomerang by Michael Lewis. Lewis is the bestselling author of many popular nonfiction books including The Big Short, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, and The Blind Side.

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Welcome to The Best Audiobooks, where we publish free audiobook excerpts from bestselling books, both fiction and nonfiction. The goal of each episode is to teach you something you didn't know, or to tell a story, and give you an accurate feel for that particular audiobook. Currently, audiobook samples are not easy to find, nor curated or helpful. And because Audible membership is expensive and purchasing individual audiobooks even more so, I decided to create this podcast. It's a hobby, a passion project of sorts :)

Featured authors include Malcolm Gladwell, Ernest Hemingway, Jared Diamond, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Foster Wallace and many more. There will be at least two new books every week.

Visit TheBookPod.com to see my curated Amazon store featuring every audiobook on this podcast. You can preview and buy the audiobooks there.

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I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me - Ralph Waldo Emerson