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"The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith / 1776
Condensed from Wikipedia << http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations >>
This page is a brief introduction to (a) the history and significance of the book and (b) one of the book's important original concepts: "The Invisible Hand of the Market"
This is an account of political economy at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and is widely considered to be the first modern work in the field of economics.
The invisible hand
There are two important features of Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand”. First, Smith was not advocating a social policy (that people should act in their own self interest), but rather was describing an observed economic reality (that people do act in their own interest). Second, Smith was not claiming that all self-interest has beneficial effects on the community. He did not argue that self-interest is always good; he merely argued against the view that self-interest is necessarily bad. It is worth noting that, upon his death, Smith left much of his personal wealth to charity.
On another level, though, the “invisible hand” refers to the ability of the market to correct for seemingly disastrous situations with no intervention on the part of government or other organizations (although Smith did not, himself, use the term with this meaning in mind). For example, Smith says, if a product shortage were to occur, that product’s price in the market would rise, creating incentive for its production and a reduction in its consumption, eventually curing the shortage. The increased competition among manufacturers and increased supply would also lower the price of the product to its production cost plus a small profit, the “natural price.” Smith believed that while human motives are often selfish and greedy, the competition in the free market would tend to benefit society as a whole anyway. This was later adopted as a universal principle by the laissez-faire economists of the 19th century.
History and significance
The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, during the Age of Enlightenment. It influenced not only authors and economists, but governments and organizations. For example, Alexander Hamilton was influenced in part by The Wealth of Nations to write his Report on Manufactures, in which he argued against many of Smith’s policies. Interestingly, Hamilton based much of this report on the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and it was, in part, to Colbert’s ideas that Smith wished to respond with The Wealth of Nations.
Many other authors were influenced by the book and used it as a starting point in their own work, including Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and, later, Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises. The Russian national poet Aleksandr Pushkin refers to The Wealth of Nations in his 1833 verse-novel Eugene Onegin.
Irrespective of historical influence, however, The Wealth of Nations represented a clear leap forward in the field of economics, similar to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica for physics or Antoine Lavoisier’s Traité Élémentaire de Chimie for chemistry.
Thus, while it cannot accurately be said to be the “first” modern work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations must still be termed the “founding” work of economics, as it, and no other work, is the progenitor of almost all modern economic theory. Chydenius and others may have been first in the sense of strict timing, but Smith’s work was the first to have a wide influence. It should be noted however that, canonical as Smith’s book may be, one is unlikely to find many economists today who have actually read it, given the technical nature of modern economics.
End of setcion B -- next is C-1