What would Adam Smith make of the AI revolution?
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith’s seminal text in the history of economics. Smith gave his name to the institute that I co-founded, so you might expect me to advocate for reading his most famous text. But you shouldn’t. It’s very long, written in elegant but spacious prose and full to exasperation of examples, observations and terminologies that puzzle a modern reader. Read my Condensed Wealth of Nations instead or wait for my cartoon graphic novel to come out later in the year. Smith would see the scale of government today as the greatest tyranny Nonetheless, modern unreadability doesn’t mean that
