I think most people have heard of the idea of the “invisible hand” of markets. It’s an idea that came from Adam Smith, an odd and somewhat mysterious person whose birthdate is unknown, but he was baptized on June 16, 1723.
He was born in Scotland and raised by a single mother; his father had died just two months before his baptism (which in those days was generally very soon after a baby was born). Back in his own day, though, Smith’s baptism was listed as June 5. The change is because of the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
Very little is known about Smith’s childhood. His mother reportedly encouraged him to pursue academics, which he did. He entered the University of Glasgow when he was just 14 (not as big a feat then as it would be today), and studied “moral philosophy,” which nowadays would probably just be called “philosophy.” He was awarded a scholarship at Oxford, in England. He didn’t like it there, but stayed because they had the best libraries, which is where he spent most of his time. He wasn’t a popular person on campus — and in fact never was; he was reportedly somewhat odd-looking, had a speech impediment, talked to himself constantly, and was so often distracted and absent minded that his acquaintances described episodes of him walking directly into holes and stuffing bread and butter into a teapot instead of tea leaves — and drinking the result, having not noticed what he’d done.
Nevertheless, his writing was recognized as brilliant, and his two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were widely read. In particular, The Wealth of Nations is credited as one of the bases for the whole field of economics.
He was the first to make a distinction between “productive labor,” like farming, and “unproductive labor,” like brushing all the dust off the prince’s clothes. It was his idea that working for your own interests, at least in a just society, might end up benefiting everyone, not just yourself. But for all that he was pretty consistently anti-business, because he contended that businesses would always try to engage in “conspiracy against the public or in some other contrivance to raise prices.” He also warned that a political system dominated by business would end up with businesspeople “scheming” to influence policy and legislation, again against the public interest. He said “the interest of manufacturers and merchants in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.”
One of the reasons we really don’t know much about Adam Smith is that he directed that all his personal papers be destroyed after he died. He also destroyed the manuscripts he was working on near the end of his life; supposedly they contained drafts for two additional books. And although his ideas led to the laissez-faire practices of the British Empire, Smith himself was against the whole idea of empires, and argued that other societies should be treated by the British as equals, not inferiors. Probably just more evidence that people “hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest.”
