Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations at 250

Last week I participated in a National Association of Scholars event on the 250^th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The event was part of their series of 1776-themed programming. An earlier session covered the Declaration of Independence, and the next will focus on Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which was published in 1776.

The Adam Smith panel is on YouTube here.

The first speaker was Daniel Klein of George Mason University, one of the world’s foremost Adam Smith scholars. His remarks begin at about 4:30. My remarks begin at about 25:00. The third speaker was The Tyranny of Metrics author Jerry Muller, who begins at about 41:00. The Q&A starts at about 55:00.

My remarks focused on Adam Smith as a communicator and political strategist. I gave a related talk in May at the CEI Summit in Asheville, North Carolina. Video of that talk is here.

Also worth watching from the CEI Summit is a session from the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy about Julian Simon, who put Smith’s ideas into practice in ways that continue to improve the world. Marian won CEI’s Julian L. Simon Memorial Award in 2023 along with his Superabundance co-author, Gale Poole.