Happy Birthday Adam Smith (maybe)!

Possibly. We know when his birth was registered, and normally that would be a couple of days after the event itself. The registration was in early June 1723, but since the calendar changed in 1750, you have to add a few days, so 16 June seems close enough.

His childhood in Kirkcaldy, a small working port on Scotland’s east coast, was largely uneventful, except for briefly being kidnapped by vagrants. But the local school did give him a good education—a school system which he later praised. It was good enough for him to win a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford—which he later definitely did not praise. Indeed, he found that the professors there had “given up even the pretence of teaching” because they got paid whether they taught or not. 

On his return—the journey took a month each way, on horseback—a family friend arranged for him to do some public lectures in Edinburgh, after which Smith secured a teaching position at the University of Glasgow. There, he wrote a book on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which brought him instant fame. Enlightenment thinkers sought a firmer foundation for ethics than the dogma of clerics and commands of kings. Some sought ‘rational’ alternatives. Smith, however, identified morality as a feature of human social psychology. We have a natural sympathy for others. Their pleasure or pain affects us; and we like to please them:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

That natural sympathy binds and benefits the whole human species.

On the strength of Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Duke of Buccleuch’s stepfather hired Smith, on a £300 pension for life, to tutor Duke, aged only 12. Taking him on the Grand Tour of Europe, Smith picked up endless facts about different systems of commerce and regulation. He started writing The Wealth of Nations, weaving current and original ideas into a new, systematic, modern approach to economics.

The Wealth of Nations was both an economic treatise and a polemic. It debunked mercantilism, the prevailing system by which countries tried to boost their cash resources by selling as much as possible to others, but buying as little as possible from them. So, they subsidised exports and raised resisted imports. 

But both sides benefit from trade, said Smith, not just sellers. The sellers get cash, but the buyers get goods that they value more than the price. What makes a country rich is not the gold in its vaults, but its vibrant trade and commerce. Wealth came from liberating commerce, not restricting it.

The division of labour made free commerce even more productive. Specialist producers can be thousands of times more productive than amateurs. They can produce more than they need, selling their surpluses to buy capital equipment that makes them more productive still. They do this for their own ends, but their actions benefit everyone:

Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

This commerce automatically steers resources to where they are needed. Where things are scarce, consumers will pay more, so suppliers produce more. When there is a glut, prices fall and producers switch their effort into more profitable lines. So, without any regulation and planning:

[T]he obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man...is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty [for which] no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.

This liberal system benefits the poor most. Smith hated merchants using their political influence to win monopolies, tax preferences, controls and other privileges that distort markets in their favour—today’s crony capitalism. Instead, government must be limited to its core functions of providing the defence, justice and infrastructure that enables commerce to succeed. Leave people free, and the results will amaze you. 

Which seems a good message for today. Happy birthday, Adam Smith!