Note: This essay began as a lecture for my economics students, assigned to tackle The Wealth of Nations. I’m sharing it here because the challenge of reading difficult books seriously reaches far beyond the classroom.
Socrates never wrote. He mistrusted anything that could not answer back. A book repeats itself; it cannot bleed, revise, or blush. Writing, he warned, is the costume knowledge puts on when it wants to stop thinking. Yet here you are, skimming an essay that insists a book still matters. Why?
Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Two-and-a-half centuries later he’s missing from most syllabi, yet every supply-and-demand chart carries his DNA.
Forget the bullion laws and salt-cod tariffs; those were local fixes for an 18th-century plumbing system. What travels is the analytical core: specialization, competition and feedback from prices. If you doubt the distance, compare a Navigation Act—an 18th-century shipping law to today’s Amazon fee schedule. Both are market rules, but only one updates hourly.
That’s why arguing that Smith is no longer policy-relevant misses the point. Smith’s prescriptions expired; his questions have not. How does prosperity persist? Where does monopoly hide? Why do strangers cooperate at all? Swap guild charters for app-store terms and the puzzle is the same—just rendered in code rather than parchment or paper.
Smith described capitalism before anyone knew to call it that. To him it wasn’t an ideology or a planned system; it was just people making choices, prices carrying messages, and order emerging spontaneously. He wanted to know one thing: how do things coordinate themselves when no one’s in charge?
He spent months in France with the Physiocrats—the land-is-everything crowd. He thought they were wrong but admired their instinct to see the whole system. They were building mental scaffolding. So was he. That’s why The Wealth of Nations endures: a user manual for prosperity, written before prosperity even knew its own name. Every Uber ride and every container ship moving through the Suez Canal is part of that system. People serve each other’s wants without meeting. It only works because of one thing Smith assumed: competition.
When a few firms control access, cooperation turns into dependency. In Smith’s time, monopoly meant guilds or colonial licenses. Today it shows up in app stores, lobbying budgets that outlast election cycles, and algorithms no one can audit. Though trained on public content, AI systems are privately held, with pricing and access dictated by a shrinking number of firms. In healthcare, rebate negotiations are so complicated even experts can’t agree who benefits. This is coordination but optimized for insiders. And most of it runs in plain sight, embedded in systems we don’t even know how to question.
In 2024, the U.S. spent or earmarked more on interest payments than on national defense. That’s not defeat by invasion; it is what happens when a superpower, reluctant or retreating, surrenders to the weight of its own past choices. Smith warned that concentrated power rarely conspires in public. Today, the debt multiplies, accountability dissolves, and no one is to blame. It’s not conquest by a foreign army, but it is submission driven by past choices and present evasions.
Yet in the long march toward prosperity, our greatest breakthrough wasn’t fire, the printing press or electricity. It was the discovery that strangers could cooperate. Out of loyalty? No. Because prices moved, incentives aligned, and institutions evolved to make the improbable routine.
The Wealth of Nations never created this world. But it described its arrival with a rigor no one had managed before—and perhaps since. The claim was radical: a stable society could be built even when most of its members owed each other nothing. Exchange, not love thy neighbor, could hold the center.
That perspective made markets legible and capitalism a viable option. It has shaped the last three centuries of policy and institutional design across all oceans. And yet, the book itself remains largely unread. It’s assigned more often than engaged with, quoted more often than questioned.
It’s not hard to see why. Smith is long-winded, repetitive, often frustrating. But he wasn’t writing for comfort or ease. He wrote to challenge and provoke. That’s why his pages aren’t intellectual fast food. They are bait in an attempt to build a framework. He wanted to disturb lazy hopes and unearned certainties, not confirm them.
The question is: when did we start quoting him without reading him? Part of the answer lies in how we read.
After the final exam a student lingered: “Professor, I studied hard, but I remember nothing.” Students take notes, highlight sentences, even ask sharp questions, yet when it’s time to think with what they’ve learned, the knowledge drifts away.
Here is why this is relevant: Smith mapped patterns that are still playing out today. The same forces that shaped 18th-century pin factories show up in your student loan terms and why certain apps dominate your phone. The problem isn’t the material; it’s how we read it. Attention, not just effort, rewires the brain. A well-framed argument can tilt your mental axis, but only if you meet it with full awareness. Reading serious books is costly. You risk the one resource you can’t replace: time. Brad DeLong makes the same point in Reading Difficult Books, arguing that the solution isn’t shorter books but deeper reading habits.
So don’t read like a consumer. A consumer treats ideas as finished goods. With classics that’s self-defeating. Great authors (dead or alive) write to be resisted, argued with, remembered. That’s on you now.
How to Read Like a Director
Movie directors don’t just tell stories—they manage attention. They know that one well-placed image can outpunch a thousand lines of dialogue. A locked door at just the wrong moment. A hand hesitating before knocking. The best films lodge meaning inside a single, unblinking detail. A glance across a dinner table. A suitcase left at the train station. A person alone at a gravesite. A girl in red, seen once, never forgotten. Each gesture says more than a monologue. Directors aren’t just storytellers—they’re minimalists of the soul, chasing the smallest moment that can break you open.
Apply that to a difficult book. The Wealth of Nations never announces its theory first; Smith reverses the order. He buries abstraction in concrete scenes, then lets you dig out the principle only after it has worked on you. To read him well, you reverse-engineer his blocking: surface first, depth later. Do that and you stop being Smith’s student; you become his collaborator, uncovering hidden order wherever human action knots into something larger.
Rule 1 - Make the Book Talk. Skimming a big book and underlining two quotes is no test of understanding. It is like glancing into an Airbus A380 cockpit and claiming you can fly. Instead, read every page, trace every turn, and insist the author state his case. Smith stands up to that scrutiny; so must you.
Rule 2 - Read the Full Frame. Smith’s famous line—“By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society”—is half the thought. A few lines later comes the warning: when merchants gain market power, their meetings “end in a conspiracy against the public.” Cite the promise while ignoring the peril, and you’ve edited the record.
Stage the conversation: Adam Smith warns about monopoly → Peter Thiel warns “Competition is for losers” → Michael Porter’s Five Forces shows firms and nations how to escape it. Same logic, different centuries.
Rule 3 - Track the Recurring Image. Smith’s pin factory appears whenever he explains wages, trade, or productivity: eighteen steps, one wire, 4,800 pins per day. The pattern echoes everywhere—cloud services breaking software into tasks, ports coordinating global shipping, vaccine labs scaling production. We call it “complexity science” now: simple rules plus local feedback create large-scale order. Smith mapped it centuries ago.
Rule 4 - Keep the Human Thread. Economics fails when it reduces people to numbers. Smith starts with our need to be “lovely” in others’ eyes. Prices carry social signals: approval, warning, shame. The invisible hand is not mysterious once you see it is social: reputation steers behavior as much as profit. Social media just shortened the feedback loop to seconds.
Rule 5 - Spot the Update. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Smith outlines the duties of government: defense, justice, and certain public works—including education. He argues that publicly supported schooling is necessary to prevent the “gross ignorance and stupidity” bred by repetitive labor and to prepare citizens for both economic participation and civic responsibility. Educate people, and you enlarge both the market and the polity. Today’s version moves faster: smartphones, payment systems, online courses. Skills improve, trade follows. The pattern appears everywhere once you notice it.
Rule 6 – Use the Zoom Ring. Smith moves from Atlantic trade to a neighborhood butcher. Read him at both scales. If you stay macro-only, prices feel abstract. Stay micro-only, and global flows vanish. Switching between them is how insight deepens.
But these aren’t just reading habits. They are defenses against the echo chambers that form even among smart people. All brains seek shortcuts. Staging debates between writers is how you red-team your own assumptions. You’re testing ideas in conditions they weren’t designed for.
The Test. Not every difficult book deserves this kind of scrutiny. Some just want your sleepless nights. You ever notice how some books take your time like it’s a donation? You finish and think, “Oops! Was that it?” Like lending an hour to a stranger at the airport: gone, no thank-you, no interest. Smith’s Wealth of Nations doesn’t. His framework absorbs contradiction and reflects it back. Test it seriously, and it pushes back.
The Dead Make the Better Mentors
The dead don’t adjust to your intuitions. They won’t flatter you, but they will pressure-test your ideas. Treat them like a board you can’t fire—because they refuse obedience, and some ideas deserve burial.1
Take one student: at first, he simply quoted Smith. By semester’s end, he was staging debates—Smith vs. Thiel on monopoly, Hayek vs. his mother on dispersed knowledge. Even his internship memos read like arguments. He wasn’t reading anymore; he was directing ideas.
Some books are mirrors. Others are MRI scans. You think you’re reading them until you realize they’ve been reading you. Most people approach books linearly: more pages, more facts. But great books yield increasing returns. Engagement doesn’t just teach you more; it teaches you to see more. Once Smith’s framework lives in your head, it starts decoding the world: shipping apps, school boards, banana stands.
When Theory Buys Bananas
That matters most where theory doesn’t land. I was in Haiti in the mid-1990s, not long after Aristide returned. No one thinks about market theory when buying fruit for breakfast. I thought I understood how prices reflect scarcity, how incentives shape behavior. But that day, none of it felt useful. I just wanted bananas.
At a roadside stall, I tried to buy a small bunch. Simple enough. But the price kept shifting—once because a rival buyer appeared, once because I smiled too soon, once because my brother asked a question the wrong way. Her son—maybe six—watched, amused. She wasn’t just selling; she was decoding. My hiking boots, my jeans, the way we spoke—all of it entered the price.
It didn’t feel like a scam. It felt precise. One part scarcity, one part charm, one part power. And something more: hospitality. I stopped thinking about bananas and started wondering why it felt like I was getting the kind of attention reserved for guests at the Ritz-Carlton.
Back then, safety wasn’t a concern. I paid more than a local, less than she first asked, and walked away with fruit and the feeling I’d been studied more closely than I realized.
To this day, I don’t know why Adam Smith came to mind while I stood there. Maybe because the moment invited triangulation—Smith, sure, but also John Maynard Keynes, that flamboyant lover of paradox and improvisation. He would’ve loved it2 Still, I found myself asking: was Smith right—but is this what he meant? There was no invisible hand—just a real one, adjusting the price as fast as the facts changed. Not mechanical. Not malicious. Just fast.
And then there was the sound: a chant in Haitian Creole, rising like a Caribbean storm. The most information-rich signal I’ve ever received. “Papa Loko, ou se van, pouse n ale. Nou se papiyon, n’a voye nouvèl bay Agwe.” My grandmother used to hum it. That day, the banana seller sang—for herself, for us, for the gods.
She wasn’t pleading. She was transmitting to me, to my brother, to the rival buyer behind us that she was a butterfly dispatching news to the sea god. Vodou not as religion, but as protocol. A decentralized information system for a low-trust world, where the post office never worked and everyone became a node. If Friedrich Hayek who knew something about uncertainty had grown up in Haiti, he might have understood the scene immediately. Not just the market. The message flow.
Later, I tried naming what happened: price discrimination? Maybe. But that felt like using a tax code to explain a yard sale in a country where the word tax is as foreign as snow. The term shrunk the moment. It reduced her genius to a pricing strategy.
Sometimes theory reveals what’s there. Sometimes it flattens what matters. That day, I didn’t need a better model. I needed slower eyes. She probably couldn’t read. But she understood scarcity, charm, signal, and what economists call third-degree price discrimination. She called it Tuesday.
That’s what the dead teach you - not just to see markets everywhere, but to see what markets can’t capture. The banana seller was running three systems simultaneously: a pricing mechanism, an information network, and a spiritual protocol. Smith saw the first, Hayek glimpsed the second, but you need all three to understand her Tuesday life in Haiti.
A trip like that doesn’t transform you. But it does clarify something essential: the dead won’t solve every puzzle. But they sharpen the questions. Smith’s lens still holds, but it bends the view. And that bent view, shaped by history’s best minds, becomes the beginning of your own.
So pick your board wisely: a moralist, a planner, a libertarian, a revolutionary, a philosopher of freedom, maybe even a novelist who knew that economics without justice is just noise. They won’t vote your way. But they will show you where you’re wrong. Then argue back.
Why It Matters
Americans are about to inherit trillions of dollars—equivalent to several years of U.S. GDP moving from Boomers to spouses and heirs, with little reaching philanthropy. Yet almost no one asks what happens to a society that conquers scarcity but forgets how to pose serious questions. When comfort becomes our highest aim, curiosity itself turns optional until the next crisis reminds us comfort can’t think.
Putting money in low-fee index funds makes sense individually, but if everyone does it, something unintended happens. Owners of businesses traditionally keep each other honest by competing. But index-fund investing spreads ownership so thinly that no single owner has the incentive or the leverage to pay attention. Who’s left to challenge managers who get lazy or incumbents who rig the rules? Adam Smith’s insight was that markets depend on active oversight and real competition. If everyone owns everything, maybe no one really owns anything—leaving coordination to insiders, precisely the scenario Smith warned us about.3
Consequently, as capital concentrates, the ability to think independently becomes more valuable, not less. Reading this way isn’t just intellectual growth; it’s cognitive leverage. In a world where financial and cultural signals grow noisier by the day, the capacity to engage with the classics becomes a rare kind of comparative advantage. So, don’t read to keep up. Read to stay awake.
But markets aren’t the only thing distorted when capital piles up. So is speech. Power doesn’t always censor by burning books; it often just makes speaking inconvenient or risky. When public speech becomes dangerous (especially for the weak) the need for classics grows urgent. In places where electricity flickered, a single copy of Marx or Montesquieu passed hand to hand, covers worn smooth. Readers didn’t need a teacher; they needed a framework to name what had been made unthinkable.
When speech fails, writers like Frankétienne turn to memory and metaphor. His play “Pelin Tet”, written in exile’s voice, unfolds in a New York basement, where two Haitian immigrants—broken by exile and barely surviving—grapple with madness, language, and loss. What emerges is friction: the feeling of being trapped between worlds. Madness becomes a stand-in for truth, because only the socially discarded can speak freely. In a different register, Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns become a study in how power moves. Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs show how nations survive as ideas, long after their institutions collapse.
Modern censorship works differently. Yes, some books still get banned—even in U.S. schools, where state boards have removed titles. But more often, books aren’t removed; they’re drowned. Nobody burns The Wealth of Nations; we just assume we know what it says. Perhaps distraction does what fire once did. We don’t just forget. We choose not to remember, because remembering makes demands. Smith makes demands.
Under old censorship, we developed coded language. “Competition” was safe; “exploitation” was not. “Market dynamics” worked; “class struggle” didn’t. You whispered “inequality” but could safely say “income disparity.” The classics became a smuggled vocabulary, useful not because they told us what to think but because they let us ask what had been made unthinkable. Anyone who has worked in government knows the gap between what gets said in public and what gets discussed after the meeting ends. Smith’s framework helps explain why.
What questions should we be asking now? How do we name the nihilism settling over so many? And how much can reading still help? I’ve sketched an outline, but the vigilance that alters not just what we know but how we think—indeed, what we think we know—can’t be contained in a single essay.
We’ve been warned that when material progress feels settled, what remains is a hunger for meaning—thymos—that can curdle into boredom or tribal rage. That hunger is the bottomless space we’re standing in now. Socrates sensed the danger long before Francis Fukuyama: comfort blunts the impulse to pose dangerous questions. He refused to write anything for that reason, and on this point I can’t disagree.
Smith’s text provokes from beyond the grave; the book ends, but the argument does not. And if most of this wealth transfer ends up passively parked in index funds, what happens when everyone owns everything yet no one can steer anything? What kind of capitalism is that? If we don’t apply these tools to current realities, we leave coordination—and power—to those who already have both. Leo Strauss warned that when societies fixate on comfort and lose sight of nobler aims, critics of liberal democracy turn to older, darker myths in search of meaning. That isn’t history repeating, but it’s a rhyme worth confronting.
Smith won’t write the next chapter. You will. Whether it begins in clarity or ends in distortion depends on whether we still know how to read when the stakes are highest.
What will you do next?
I stole this idea from Jim Collins who advised students to create a “personal board of directors.” For Collins, one of his board members was Peter Drucker, whose insights shaped his work for decades.
To my knowledge, John Maynard Keynes never made it to Haiti, but he would have loved it in the 1950s—maybe too much. The flair, the contradictions, the improvisational energy would have matched his flamboyance and genius. Would he have walked the streets in linen to advise? Or just to observe how uncertainty isn’t a theory—it’s breakfast. He might not have written a different book, but he surely would’ve stayed longer than planned.
Jack Bogle and Harry Markowitz revolutionized investing, proving the benefits of diversification and bringing low-cost index investing to millions—undeniably enriching the middle class. Nonetheless, widespread passive investing creates unintended systemic consequences that Adam Smith foresaw.