I’m the biggest fan of this book and think it does a better job than Mises own “master builder” story in simplifying ABCT! I think the pigs’ high regard for gold mirrors the contemporary high regard of the US dollar. Actually, in the story, it seems gold is a metaphor for the US dollar. New “gold” is created by the “Lupus Reserve” aka Federal Reserve — which the pigs spot across the “greenspan” of the lagoon. The story makes people think more critically about the paradox: how could new money cause a problem in an economy? As ABCT shows, it indeed can and does. Of course, in the real world, there is no such thing as boxes of gold washing ashore and doubling the gold supply. Gold is excellent money precisely for this reason. In the real world ABCT teaches us that artificially low interest rates cause entrepreneurs en masse to be confused about the true level of savings (in a perfect world without central banks, low interest rates are properly the result of higher savings). But how did interest rates get artificially low? By the central bank creating new money due to FOMC operations or allowing their fractional reserve bank buddies to create money that’s how. So the essence of the malinvestment economic boom that inevitably brings about the economic depression is simply new money. This is what the antagonist Big Bad Box Lupus Reserve does to the protagonist Pigs trio! I agree that perfectly illustrating a massive macroeconomic theory in a simple story is difficult. But I think the fairest way to judge any simplification is to ask: how does it compare to other simple stories that try to distill ABCT? As you know, Mises himself wrote a simple story to help explain ABCT (and he also doesn’t include credit markets!): Once upon a time a (partly off the wagon) master builder decides to build a mansion from a nice pile of bricks. Part-way through laying the bricks, the builder soberly suspects that his dwindling pile might not be enough to complete the project. Just as central bankers issue new money to lower interest rates to keep an economy booming, so antagonists in this builder story similarly devise a way to keep/make the builder stupified with alcohol so that he doesn’t realize there are not enough bricks to complete the mansion. The result is more severe malinvestment than there would have been and a thoroughly economically depressed builder — with a hangover to boot. The end. OK. And how does Mises’ effort compare with this Austrian-spin Three Little Pigs story? I’ve already said I’m the biggest fan so you might guess what my sober assessment might be. With the Pigs story, we have a smoothly operating three-man economy that gets muddled up in a logical and believable way by the arrival of new money. Just like the real world. No giving booze a bad rap required. Cheers. EMF.