Adam Smith Warns: Beware the Profit-Seekers
This reminds me of the time I read Smith in a grad seminar. I mention the reading offhandedly to my mentor, the economist. His response: Do they know the REAL Adam Smith?
That’s a good question for us all. Do we know the real Adam Smith?
A faithful reader sent the following quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations:
Merchants and master manufacturers are, in this order, the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their…
View original post 270 more words
tressiemc 