Last Monday, I delivered a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s second-best book: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
The year 1776 was a momentous one for many reasons. It saw the installation of James Watt’s first steam engine, the recognition of Captain Cook by the Royal Society for his work in preventing scurvy, and his departure on his final and ultimately fatal voyage. It witnessed the publication of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
You could say that the woke playbook didn’t just originate in the United States; it originated the United States
It also saw one of the whiniest publications in history, a tedious sob story called the Declaration of Independence, in which a collection of colonial real-estate speculators, no longer at risk from the Spanish or French, confected a litany of spurious grievances they claimed to have suffered at the hands of the British Crown largely to advance their own narrow financial ambitions.
Seen through the lens of pecuniary self-interest, the real beef behind the Declaration wasn’t life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness – that was just clever marketing. Instead, it arose because the Crown had prevented many of the signatories from profiting from their land-holdings by banning westward expansion into territory occupied by native tribes; worse, the Ohio Valley had recently been handed to the Province of Quebec, preventing many of the Founding Fathers from opening the 18th-century equivalent of golf courses and casino resorts on land they hoped to buy for a pittance.
If you think Donald Trump is anomalous, you are 100 per cent wrong. He is absolutely the heir to Washington, Jefferson and the other tax evaders and property speculators whose signatures will be proudly on display this year. (John Hancock orchestrated the Boston Tea Party because he’d been making a fortune smuggling in untaxed Dutch tea; the new, lightly taxed but cheaper East India Company tea threatened to upend his business model.)
You could say that the woke playbook – where injustices are amplified as a smokescreen behind which to advance your narrow class interest – didn’t just originate in the United States; it originated the United States. In this case, the class was simply plantation owners. Dr Johnson, the most reliable bullshit-detector of that or any other age, spotted this immediately: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’
The cherry-picking of self-serving justifications is nothing new, of course. Which brings me back to The Wealth of Nations. Rereading this before writing my speech (hosted by the Adam Smith Institute, so it seemed only polite), it struck me that the book has been more unfairly misrepresented than almost any other.
It has been interpreted for the most part as being about efficiency: how to use the division of labour to do the same thing faster. This has been seized on to promote two articles of business faith – the gains to specialisation and the gains to scale. But what’s more remarkable, the more so given the date of publication, is the sophistication of Smith’s thinking on the process of innovation – and his insight into the combinatory power of ideas.
Improvements have been made by… those who are called philosophers… whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.
Think of Steve Jobs, whose philosophy at Apple was significantly influenced by a calligraphy course he took at college. What today’s equivalent of Smith’s ‘philosophers’ need is not specialist vocational training, but a broad education in the humanities.
Comments