Happy birthday, Adam Smith By Alberto Mingardi

Some 291 years ago today, Adam Smith was born. Richard Ebeling has an insightful article that beautifully introduces to the contemporary reader the “father of economics”. Scott Sumner pointed out that, according to Thomas PIketty, Smith “had more political prejudices than Ricardo”. Scott already suggested that writing that somebody has “political prejudices” very often means he has political prejudices that you do not share.

Both Ricardo and Smith wrote to persuade their audiences, though they had very different backgrounds. Ricardo was a formidable entrepreneur before becoming a theoretical economist, and his first contributions dealt with the day’s monetary problems. Smith was a moral philosopher who set out to solve a tremendous puzzle: how is it that men cooperate one with each other? He distinguished between cooperation in the small group, that is the center around which his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” gravitates, and cooperation in the extended society, which is the subject of the “Wealth of Nations“.

Francis W. Hirst, who wrote a splendid, short intellectual biography of Smith in 1904, asked a question to ponder.

In a science like political economy, every new teacher endeavours to correct the mistakes of his predecessors, to supply their deficiencies, and generally to teach the science in its last stage of perfection. Some of Smith’s successors were themselves men of genius, and proved equal to the task of displacing their master for a few years. But those who have seen the rise and decline of Mill may well ask with Wakefield, who had seen Smith superseded by Malthus and Ricardo and M’Culloch: How is it that the Wealth of Nations, all these things notwithstanding, is still read and studied and quoted as if it had been published yesterday?

This question is as relevant today as in 1904. Insofar as answers are concerned, I would consider Hirst’s still a persuasive one: