
Read Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ but don’t misread his Invisible Hand
In 1776, the year 13 American colonies declared independence from Britain, Adam Smith published his magnum opus An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; 9 March marked the 250th anniversary of its publication. While breathless praise for it was aired in many parts of the world, residents of Smith’s Scottish hometown Kirkcaldy opted for a characteristically quiet pragmatism: a modest Heritage Centre and a plaque on a brick wall marking the spot where his childhood home was unceremoniously razed in the 19th century.Globally, to the Right, Smith is the patron saint of ‘greed is good,’ a man whose book Thatcher reportedly brandished in her handbag like a holy relic. To the Left, he is the grandfather of market fundamentalism.The reality, though, is inconvenient.
The most famous term in economics—the ‘invisible hand’—is perhaps also the most misunderstood. Smith used this phrase only three times in his entire published corpus. He never used it to describe the magic of the price mechanism.
Instead, Smith’s ‘hand’ was a literary flourish borrowed, perhaps with a wink, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. While the ‘invisible hand’ gets the limelight, Smith’s actual policy prescriptions often favoured the ‘visible hand’ of the state. He laid the foundation for modern tax systems based on fairness, certainty, convenience and efficiency.
Read on livemint.com