Book
1776
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
A nation's wealth comes from the productivity gains of specialisation and the division of labour, coordinated not by design but by each person pursuing their own interest within a system of markets.
Read itHow it opens
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.
The opening of the work itself, so you can judge the prose rather than our description of it.
Where it is now wrong
The labour theory of value running through Book I was displaced by marginalism in the 1870s, and Book IV's long argument about the colonies is a quarrel with a world that no longer exists.
Before you start
- Assumes
- no economics, but real stamina: the digressions are long and the famous passages are a small part of it
What overturned it
Still worth reading — this is where the argument went next.
Groundwork for
Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.
Filed under Schools of Economic Thought in Economics.