![]() ![]() He wanted to know what brings the things we call material wealth into being, and why. ![]() Poverty, in his mind, was what happens when nothing happens, when people are idle by choice or force, or when production is prevented or destroyed. Note that he didn’t set out to explore the nature and causes of the poverty of nations. Smith’s choice of the longer title is revealing. (One of my most prized possessions is the two-volume 1790 edition of the book, gifted to me by an old friend it was the last edition to incorporate edits from Smith himself, just before he died in that same year.) As American colonists were declaring their independence from Britain, Smith was publishing his own shot heard round the world, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known ever since as simply The Wealth of Nations. The culmination of his thoughts in this regard came in 1776. Wealth to the world’s first economist was plainly this: goods and services. He was the first moral philosopher to recognize that the business of enterprise - and all the motives and actions in the marketplace that give rise to it - was deserving of careful, full-time study as a modern discipline of social science. Boulding paid this tribute to his intellectual predecessor: “Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made.”Įconomics in the late 18th century was not yet a focused subject of its own, but rather a poorly organized compartment of what was known as “moral philosophy.” Smith’s first of two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published in 1759 when he held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. He would become the Father of Economics as well as one of history’s most eloquent defenders of free markets. It’s presumed that he was either born on that day or a day or two before. He was baptized on June 5, 1723, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. Adam Smith entered a world that his reason and eloquence would later transform. ![]()
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