HIGH POINT, N.C. (WGHP) — Ask most economists what the most important books ever published are, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is likely to be one of the top three, if not number one.
The full name is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Many see it as a how-to book for a nation on how it should set up its economy, but High Point University economist Chris de Bodisco says it’s so much more.
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“It was a moral philosophy – Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, there was no economics before Adam Smith and so he approached this kind of the same way we do now from human behavior,” says de Bodisco. “And you can’t understand how revolutionary this is until you think back to the times of hundreds of years before Adam Smith.”
Before Smith, societies got wealthier by taking what another society had. Smith showed them how they can “create” wealth through a division of labor…