Title  'Adam Smith’s economic legacy at 250’   by  Prof Alex Trew

Summary:  Two hundred and fifty years ago, Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The book founded the discipline of economics, but Smith himself has become a caricature in the public imagination as a naïve champion of markets and self-interest. The real Smith is more interesting, and more important. This talk begins with his life, and in particular his long association with Glasgow: student at fourteen, Professor of Logic and then of Moral Philosophy, and later Rector, in years he called the happiest and most useful of his life. In his early essay on the history of astronomy, where he argues that scientific theories are inventions of the imagination, built to make a disordered world feel orderly — a view that tells us a great deal about what he thought he was doing in his own two great books. Then The Theory of Moral Sentiments, on how our moral judgements are formed by imagining ourselves in the position of others. And then The Wealth of Nations itself, including the parts usually left out: his suspicion of powerful merchants, his sympathy for workers, and the clear role he saw for government. Finally, what became of him — the nineteenth-century claim that his two books contradict one another, the twentieth-century “greed is good” caricature, and a recent recovery of the broader thinker, with some reflections on what economists have learned about the wealth of nations since.

Speaker:   Alex Trew is Professor of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, a member of the Council of the Scottish Economic Society, a fellow of the Royal Economic Society, and is affiliated with CESifo and IZA. Prof Trew is editor of The Wealth of Nations at 250, a volume of contributions from some of the world’s leading economists and economic historians (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wealth-of-nations-at-250/CD2AD664B28766AC1B448158AF059E25).