By PETER PASSELL

EAT THE RICH

By P.J. O'Rourke.

246 pp. New York.

Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.



had one fundamental question about economics,'' P. J. O'Rourke, the reigning political satirist of the Rolling Stone generation, writes. ''Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?'' ''It's not a matter of brains,'' he goes on. ''No part of the earth (with the possible exception of Brentwood) is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they're boiling stones for soup.''

To slake his late-blooming curiosity -- O'Rourke proudly explains in ''Eat the Rich'' that he eschewed economics in college in favor of sex, drugs and ceramics -- he tried reading a couple of introductory textbooks. But along with finding the writing distasteful (''The prose style is at once puerile and impenetrable, 'Goodnight Moon' rewritten by Henry James''), our intrepid scholar is appalled at their least-common-denominator content.

How, then, to answer the question? In what was transparently an excuse to go junketing, O'Rourke decided to unleash his keen powers of observation on a tour of successful and unsuccessful economies. ''I'd wander around, gape at things,'' he writes, ''and simply ask people 'Why are you so broke?' ''

This is a promising beginning. For while O'Rourke may not be Tocqueville, he is witty, smart and -- though he hides it under a tough coat of cynicism -- a fine reporter.

Alas, the payoff to readers craving fresh insight into the core issues of economics is very modest: like a zillion commentators before him, O'Rourke decides that free markets, defended by the rule of law, generate the best of possible worlds. And like a substantial subset of those zillion commentators, he decides that messing around with markets in the name of economic justice generally does more harm than good: ''If wealth is not a worldwide round robin of purse snatching, and if the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor, why should we care about fairness at all?''

But my guess is that readers who enjoyed O'Rourke's best seller ''Parliament of Whores'' have less highfalutin goals in mind. And ''Eat the Rich'' won't disappoint them. The book is loaded with cracks, often in bad taste, at the expense of familiar targets, like Fidel Castro, the trans-Siberian railway, Sweden's welfare cornucopia. And it occasionally surprises with zingers at the expense of the less familiar: Tanzania's gentle tyranny, the curator of the Hermitage Museum, Shanghai's overheated real-estate market.

Start with O'Rourke's analysis of Wall Street. On the Standard & Poor's rating system: ''A D-rated bond is like money lent to a younger brother. An AAA-rated bond is like money lent to a younger brother by the Gambino family.'' On the illicit lure of the hybrid securities known as derivatives: ''In 1994 the treasurer of Orange County, California, picked up a derivative hitchhiking on Sunset, drove around the corner for a little fiduciary slap and tickle, and the next morning an entire suburb of Los Angeles awoke to find that its streets and sewers had been sold at a bankruptcy auction.''

Move on to Albania's problems of transition from Stalinism to anarchy. ''The Albanian concept of freedom approaches my own ideas on the subject, circa late adolescence. There's a great deal of hanging out and a notable number of weekday, midafternoon drunk fellows,'' O'Rourke writes. ''Even their gambling is comparatively idle -- exhibiting none of the industry shown by the old bats in Atlantic City with their neatly ordered Big Gulp cups of quarters and special slot-machine yanking gloves.''

Or the tragedy of Tanzania's hippie dictator Julius Nyerere, who, with tens of billions of dollars from the foreign-aid establishment, managed to transform the resource-rich British colony into one of Africa's poorest republics in a few short decades: ''Excerpts from Nyerere's writing sound like a 1969 three-bong-hit rap from somebody going off to found an organic tofu-growing commune.''

Midway through the grand tour O'Rourke pauses for a long riff on the failure of academic economists to deliver the good news about capitalism. But his ''10 Less-Basic Principles of Economics,'' which range from ''So You Die. Things Still Cost What They Cost'' to ''Everybody's an Expert,'' are not particularly acute. Indeed, they are a wretched muddle, suggesting that when it comes to synthesizing grand principles from accumulated wisecracks, O'Rourke's reach exceeds his grasp.

But true O'Rourke groupies will be laughing too hard to care. ''Eat the Rich'' is a delightful collection of anecdotes and one-liners. Those who insist on leavening their entertainment with redeeming social significance can always watch public television.

