The Wealth of Nations Themes

Who'da thunk it: a book called The Wealth of Nations spends a bunch of time talking about wealth.Smith spends most of this book explaining to us why some countries develop more quickly (and become...

In modern capitalism, the family becomes a massively important institution. You might think that everyone is just out for themselves in a competitive economy, but family is an important exception t...

Even though he believes in a world of free trade, Adam Smith knows that war will always be a part of human existence. After all, some countries will always be richer than others, and that's bound t...

Adam Smith is a firm believer in education… especially when it comes to making a strong society. The more educated people you have, the more likely you are to have people who will come up with th...

If there's one thing that makes the free market great in Adam Smith's mind, it's competition, competition, competition. In The Wealth of Nations, competition is the engine that drives all modern pr...

In The Wealth of Nations, human pride and arrogance tend to get in the way of good economics more than anything else. For example, evidence clearly showed in Smith's time that it was more efficient...

Adam Smith is pretty much the opposite of a socialist insofar as he thinks the government should never touch the economy—or at least meddle as little as possible. That means that there are going...

In Smith's time, people believed that Western European countries were fundamentally better and more advanced than the countries of Africa and Asia. They thought this was the case because they had a...