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An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith, published on March 9, 1776 during the Scottish Enlightenment. It is a clearly written account of political economy at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and is widely considered to be the first modern work in the field of economics. The work is also the first comprehensive defense of free market policies.

For anyone coming to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations the first surprise is how readable it is. Famous classic of economic theory though it may be, this is no dry academic tome to be read only by people with a scholarly interest in economic history. There are no detailed tables of statistics of the sort one might expect to find in a modern book on the subject, and no mathematical analysis, indeed not very much quantitative information at all. Instead there is a long series of examples to explain such ideas as why it is more efficient to divide work among several specialists rather than have a complete task fulfilled by one person, or why slave labour is ultimately more expensive than paying free workers, even workers in cities like Boston or New York, where wages were far higher in Smith's time than those in his native Scotland.

To illustrate the principle of the division of labour Smith discusses the manufacture of nails. Even a blacksmith -- skilled in working with a hammer but with no special training in nail making -- could not make more than a few hundred nails in a day, and those of poor quality. A specialist nail maker could make more than two thousand, but much greater improvements, both in quality and quantity, come from recognizing that even a task as apparently simple as manufacturing a nail can be broken up into smaller tasks: maintaining the fire at the left temperature, hammering the nail into the left shape, using a different tool to form the head, and so on.

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...reading The Wealth of Nations shows Smith to be different from his usual portrayal. He can be wickedly satirical. Anyone who has been to college will recognize much that is familiar in his thoughts (in Book V) on "Education of Youth". And he also frankly addresses the downsides of capitalism. The book begins with the division of labor as a powerful means of adding productivity. But later, he recognizes the destructive effects of division of labor and, in response, recommends government investment in public education. As one who once earned a good living as a computer programmer, and who is now retraining, I am finding perennial relevance in The Wealth of Nations.

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"Adam Smith's enormous authority resides, in the end, in the same property that we discover in Marx: not in any ideology, but in an effort to see to the bottom of things."

--Robert L. Heilbroner

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