In the Library
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith, 1776
- Form
- Form Essay
- Reading time
- Reading time 28 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 33
- Length
- Length 380k words
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About the book
Ten men in a small workshop, none of whom could make a single pin start to finish, divide the labor into eighteen distinct operations and turn out upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Adam Smith opens his inquiry into the wealth of nations with this workshop because it holds, in miniature, the whole of what follows: that plenty is not a king's hoarded gold but the ordinary, cooperative multiplication of human effort, broken into pieces and rejoined. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that you expect your dinner, he writes, but from their regard to their own interest, and daily life rests on that plain, faintly unsettling fact: that strangers who owe you nothing keep you fed, clothed, and warm because it profits them to. He named the pattern an invisible hand, guiding a result no single person intended or designed. It is the strangest kind of comfort: that nobody needs to love you for the world to keep working, and Smith was the first to write down why.