If Adam Smith had written the Wealth of Nations as a dialogue between yuppies about what stocks to buy, When the Pig Goes to Market would have been the result. Smith was an immensely learned 18th century moral philosopher; Cork is a stockbroker.

But the books are roughly comparable: each seeks out the principles of trade and then tries to lay down its rules. Smith gave the world the principles of economics fashioned from his powers of observation. Cork concludes from demography that readers should buy stocks from companies catering to aging baby boomers. His reasoning is embedded in the boomernomics theory of the expanding purchasing power of the 30-, 40-, and 50- somethings who are swimming in rising net worth. Buy the companies that make what the boomers want and ye shall grow rich is the book’s message.

Economics rendered as allegory sells a lot of books; witness The Wealthy Barber and, for that matter, the first Cork and Lightstone collaboration, The Pig and the Python. If the trend continues, When the Pig Goes to Market should do quite well.

As a critical matter, however, one has to ask about the validity of the core notion of the book – that boomers will finance their own ascent to wealth. The authors assert, among other things, that boomers are causing interest rates to fall because they are paying off their mortgages. The authors say they assume there are no international disasters on the horizon, but they ignore two critical facts in their mortgage forecast: mortgage debt is only a fraction of all business and non-business loans, and Canadian interest rates are usually made in the U.S.A. Boomers may not be able to keep interest rates down and stocks up just by saving and spending according to Cork’s rules.

Whether investments in boomer stocks will thrive more than, say, investments in other theories has yet to be determined. But as the authors note, quoting Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, a principle called “convergence to the mean” inevitably brings the results of new investment ideas and old investment ideas back to an average. Nevertheless, for novice investors When the Pig Goes to Market should be provocative.