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Comment by caiocaiocaio | Hacker News Reader

Wealth Of Nations is a weird book to read. Where I grew up, people worshipped it and generally considered it to be the second greatest book of all time, after the Bible. I ended up reading both in my thirties, and two things occurred to me:

1) It's very obvious that none of the adults I knew as a child had read more than a few isolated quotes from Wealth of Nations or the Bible. None of them had even the slightest idea what sort of content either of those books contained, or what they were like in tone or in substance. 99% of what I grew up hearing about both books was completely made up.

2) Wealth of Nations presents a very chipper and optimistic sense of entrepreneurship that 99% of people in the world of business today would consider naive at best. If Adam Smith had written that book today, he would be laughing stock.

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Any 18th century book written today would be "laughing stock" and they are all "weird to read". This is the sort of shallow dismissal that leads to generic, tedious, and eventually nasty discussion. Please don't post like this to HN.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Only on hacker news do we have individuals wise enough to mock the perspective of someone from the 1700s that is the father of modern economic thought.

We're not worthy of the great knowledge we have here, likely from a non-economist that read the book and doesn't understand the historical significance or lineage of economic thought that it kicked off.

A book a really enjoy on this topic is "The Mind and the Market" by Jerry Z. Muller. There are other history of economic thought books, but that one is my favorite.

Most books written more than 100 years ago were poor by today's standards. Editors didn't really do a good job (did the job even exist?), and it shows. It would be like publishing someone on hackernews - there might be good insight, but the grammar, prose, and spelling leave a lot to be desired.

Except that of the books published 100 years ago, the ones that stood the test of time and are still published today are far more likely to be of high quality by today's standard, while most books published in any given year will inevitably be forgotten.

Did editors exist 100 years ago? Erm, yes they did? According to Merriam Webster, the term was used in its current acception in 1649. And the job done by editors could arguably have existed for a much longer time.

This hasn't been my experience at all. And yes, there were editors more than 100 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_editing#History

I can say with certainty that your statements don't apply The Wealth of Nations. Its prose is of impeccably high quality.

> Wealth Of Nations is a weird book to read. Where I grew up, people worshipped it and generally considered it to be the second greatest book of all time, after the Bible. I ended up reading both in my thirties, and two things occurred to me:

> 1) It's very obvious that none of the adults I knew as a child had read more than a few isolated quotes from Wealth of Nations or the Bible. None of them had even the slightest idea what sort of content either of those books contained, or what they were like in tone or in substance. 99% of what I grew up hearing about both books was completely made up.

> 2) Wealth of Nations presents a very chipper and optimistic sense of entrepreneurship that 99% of people in the world of business today would consider naive at best. If Adam Smith had written that book today, he would be laughing stock.

Things make more sense with the view that The Wealth of Nations is meant to be satirical.

Can you provide a source for that? I've never read that it was meant by Smith to be satirical anywhere. It was written as a critique of mercantilist and physiocratic economic theories that had previously dominated European policy but had become antiquated by Smith's time, and to offer a new set of economic ideas for the emerging industrial era.

The parent is right, though, that it's not the Bible of the Free Market that so many people who haven't read it seem to think it is. While it does argue against the older regulatory economic regimes, it's not some ancap laissez-faire anti-government screed.

I didn't mean to present my opinion as fact, and apologies if it sounded as though I had some authoritative source on this view.

However, it seems I am not alone in this view.

> "Indeed, Smith suspected that those quickest to sing his praises had failed to understand the main arguments of his work. He later described The Wealth of Nations as a ‘very violent attack … upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain’. Despite this, his vocal political cheerleaders in Parliament continued to prop up the very system that Smith was railing against."

https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-s...

Right. I’m currently listening to Mariana Mazzucato’s ‘The value of everything’ which begins with a really excellent history of economics, placing Smith in exactly the context you describe.

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