What utter nonsense. The theoretical difficulty of pop-economics books like Hayek's Economics In One Lesson or The Road to Serfdom is less than Teach Yourself Programming In 24 Hours. That's not meant as a slight on any of those books or their authors, but your comparison is so inapt it beggars belief. The mathematical prerequisites alone for reading TAOCP are so significant that Knuth had to write an advanced undergraduate and graduate-level textbook (Concrete Mathematics) to equip students with even a small subset of the tools required.