At its best, this book can help introduce the reader to some of Smith's thinking and hopefully with the encouragement to read the rest of what is not included, but a great many readers will find this book far more appealing than Smith's actual work, and that is a great shame. It is written for people who may have heard what the fuss is about with Adam Smith but who do not have the patience to read hundreds of pages of his material. But this book is not written for completists. When you excise out the structure and the ligaments of an author's argument, you do violence to their insights, because for a good writer, striking insights spring from sound reasoning and analysis as well as the evidence that is used to provide the material of reflection. But for those readers who want to know what it is that Adam Smith thought and how he reasoned to his conclusions, this book is somewhat unsatisfying. What does this book offer to the reader? For many readers who find Smith's interest in the price of corn and in the creation of widgets, this book will qualify as a "good parts" version of the much longer Wealth of Nations. This then leads to a closing chapter on agricultural systems (6), which concludes this short selection. After this comes the author's discussion of the unreasonableness of restraints (5), which points out that the world is not based on what is reasonable. After this comes a discussion of the restraints on the importations of goods (4), where the author discusses how it is that those whose interests demand protection will often receive protection from governments, which has not always been the case but has frequently been the case. After that the material discussed comes from the latter sections of the Wealth of Nations, which are more eloquent, where the author discusses the principle of the commercial system (3) and makes comments about exchange and its nature. The first two chapters come from the opening of the Wealth of Nations and discuss the division of labor (1) and the principle of this concept and how it is to be justified and understood (2). This book is just over 100 pages and it is divided into several sections. It is entirely unclear which of the many nameless editors at Penguin lopped and cropped 90% of Adam Smith's work to make this book that is so short and so striking that some readers thought of it as a "new" or at least unknown book by the famous economist. And yet the editing of this work is entirely anonymous. This is a book where substantial credit, or blame, depending on how one looks at it, depends on the editor of the work. The Invisible Hand, as important a concept as it is for many contemporary readers, is not something that was all that important within the Wealth of Nations, and this book drastically cuts most of the core material by which Smith demonstrates his point that nations are better off by specializing and using the market, or the way that rents are such an important aspect of the wealth of nations and the people within those nations, through a discussion of the price of food. Without a question, all of the writing in this book is done by Adam Smith, but this book only contains about ten percent or so of the material that is in the Wealth of Nations. The most interesting aspects of this book is the question of authorship. I found myself wondering what he would make of today's collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and kind of wished he was still helping make the decisions. It was refreshing to have such back-to-basics, straightforward thinking based on concrete examples around making pins, trading tobacco, creating woolens or silks and even that money is inherently more difficult to control because it's small size makes it so much easier to smuggle (than, say, the same value in potatoes).ĭespite this useful examining of my fundamental economics knowledge (or lack of), Adam Smith's 17th century English does not make an easy read. I found myself pleasantly enjoying his examples, all of which date from 17th century England. In the process he usefully examines the concept of wealth, value, productivity, the divison of labor, taxes and agriculture. An unconstrained free market is a better way to run things. Adam Smith's fundamental point is that it is rarely, if ever, in the interest of a country to provide restrictions to trade. The book actually examines a lot of different fundamental notions of economics. Great to get some of the original thinking behind the Invisible Hand rather than the soundbyte.
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