The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.8

Adam Smith and the Invention of Economics

This episode checks what Adam Smith wrote against what gets attributed to him: "the invisible hand" appears three times in his published work, once in The Wealth of Nations. It dismantles the Adam Smith Problem, the claim that Smith turned from a caring moral philosopher into a cold market theorist, since he revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments until his death in 1790. You get his pin-factory example, eighteen operations producing 4,800 pins per worker instead of perhaps twenty, and his warning that repetitive labor left workers "as dull and ignorant as a human creature can become." It closes with Kuznets's 1934 warning that his national-income measure shouldn't be read as a gauge of well-being.