Reading Adam Smith in dank times: The joke will write itself
Let’s get to it straight.
It was summer of 2015 when I first came across the fact that someone named Adam Smith did exist on this planet. I won’t lie here and say that “I came across his name in an article”. No, I didn’t. I’m not that gifted. Instead, like bottom-tier plebs, I googled “best economists of all time”. And there he was — with that archetypal post-Renaissance British hairstyle. Yes, I mean the Pirates of the Caribbean one. That’s what our dude has.
And as you have probably guessed, I then moved to the next step of attaining internet enlightenment. Yes? That’s right. Wikipedia.
But fuck! What is this! Dude’s Scottish. Shite!
Until this point I thought only Trainspotting was Scottish. I felt a pristine kind of joy to find out that something else can also be Scottish.
There’s a quote in Trainspotting I remember: “Begbie didn’t do drugs either. He just did people.”
That’s me as well. I don’t do drugs either. I just do books.
It took a more than a whole year to ultimately get my hands on his most famous book The Wealth of Nations. Hence this article.
Want to know why I am not writing a scholarly article using language suitable for decent civilized humans? Don’t. Welcome to the post-truth world. Look for sensationalism, not for detailed analysis.
But not for long.
There are some books which some people want to talk about without actually reading them. I have a thing for such books.
The Wealth of Nations is one such book. Very few people has actually read this 1000+ page magnum opus written more than 225 years ago in a world vastly different from ours.
Yet it remains hugely popular today, because of it’s content which has retained its relevance over the years despite a world that has transformed dramatically.
What made this happen? What did Adam Smith write? And why so many people pretend to have read this book or know the stuff Smith talks about?
In this article, I will walk the reader through the book as I read it. There is no format I’ll confine to. I will make edits to this article over regular intervals as I keep making progress across the book.
That is how a 19-year old computer science undergraduate, a scum on the face of the earth, me, will troll himself. By reading a book that nobody reads.
This joke will write itself.
[TO BE CONTINUED]