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Economics starts with one very important assumption: Individuals act to make themselves as well off as possible.
Charles Wheelan • Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
The greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
Adam Smith • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
In all of this talk of professional identity, the Keyser Söze of this book is Adam Smith, the founder of economics himself. He was labeled an economist after the fact but he couldn’t have been one before he invented the field. In that sense he was an artist and the field he invented was his point-B creation.
Amy Whitaker • Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses
Smith provided a definition of national wealth and showed how the “whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country … naturally divides itself” among three parts: rent, wages, and profit. Those three divisions were the bases of the “three different orders of people:” those who lived by rent (landowners), those who lived by wages (labore
... See moreGlory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
The Economist • Mark Carney on how the economy must yield to human values
In that original state of things which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him. Had this state continued, the wages of labour would have augmented with all those improvements in its productive powers, to which the
... See moreAdam Smith • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith, an economist too often read as a blunt apologist for all aspects of consumer society, but in fact one of its more subtle and visionary analysts. In his The Wealth of Nations, Smith seems at points willing to concede to key aspects of Mandeville’s argument: consumer societies do help the poor by providing employment based around satisfyi
... See moreAlain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
In a similar vein, the egalitarian philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has argued that, for Smith, the “leading virtues of market society” were not growth and efficiency, but rather freedom from relationships of private domination and dependence.
Glory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock, must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal, or continually tending to equality. If, in the same neighbourhood, there was any employment evidently either more or less advantageous than the rest, so many people would crowd into it in the on
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