Why I love Adam Smith

I wanted to read Theory of Moral Sentiments for long long time but kept procrastinating it for a long long time too. Now I made myself a promise to read it before the end of this year. Depending on our connivence, roots of all of our economics is derived and picked out from his insights sans the his important enlightenment in Theory of Moral Sentiments. World would be much better place if we had sculpted our economics based on Theory of Moral Sentiments with Wealth of Nations instead of just one.

Here is Amartya Sen's great piece on the same (thanks):

"The presumption of the similarity of intrinsic talents is accepted by Smith not only within nations but also across the boundaries of states and cultures, as is clear from what he says in both Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. The assumption that people of certain races or regions were inferior, which had quite a hold on the minds of many of his contem poraries, is completely absent from Smith's writings. And he does not address these points only abstractly. For example, he discusses why he thinks Chinese and Indian producers do not differ in terms of productive ability from Europeans, even though their institutions may hinder them.

He is inclined to see the relative backwardness of African economic progress in terms of the continent's geographical disadvantages - it has nothing like the "gulfs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia" that provide opportunities for trade with other people. At one stage, Smith bursts into undisguised wrath: "There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving."

The global reach of Smith's moral and political reasoning is quite a distinctive feature of his thought, but it is strongly supplemented by his belief that all human beings are born with similar potential and, most importantly for policymaking, that the inequalities in the world reflect socially generated, rather than natural, disparities.

There is a vision here that has a remarkably current ring. The continuing global relevance of Smith's ideas is quite astonishing, and it is a tribute to the power of his mind that this global vision is so forcefully presented by someone who, a quarter of a millennium ago, lived most of his life in considerable seclusion in a tiny coastal Scottish town. Smith's analyses and explorations are of critical importance for any society in the world in which issues of morals, politics and economics receive attention. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a global manifesto of profound significance to the interdependent world in which we live."