Roberts disentangles one of our most chronic confusions - that between self-interest and selfishness. As a bonus, almost in passing, Smith tells us how to lead the good life in the fullest sense of that phrase. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book of observations about what makes us tick. He helped me understand my affection for my iPad and my iPhone, why talking to strangers about your troubles can calm the soul how morality is built into the fabric of the world. Smith made me aware of how people interact with each other in ways I hadn’t noticed before… helped me understand why Whitney Houston and Marilyn Monroe were so unhappy and why their deaths made so many people so sad. The book changed the way I looked at people, and maybe more important, it changed the way I looked at myself. Roberts recounts chancing upon this obscure book and being, to his own surprise, deeply enchanted by its relevance to so much of modern life: I share a certain kinship of spirit with Roberts, who hosts the EconTalk podcast, in dusting off forgotten and often misunderstood ideas, restoring their original dimension flattened by our sound bite culture of superficial familiarity, and recontextualizing them as timeless technologies of thought that help us live happier, more ennobled lives - which is precisely what he does with Smith’s text. That misunderstood aspect of Smith’s philosophy and its applications to our everyday lives is what Russ Roberts explores in How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness ( public library). How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. The book’s opening sentence alone is a masterpiece of prose and philosophy: And yet Smith’s own views were more generous and elevating - something he explored in his eclipsed but excellent earlier work, the 1759 treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments, full of timeless wisdom on ambition, success, good personhood, the far-from-linear relationship between money and happiness, and that wonderfully old-fashioned notion of “benevolence,” so urgently needed in our divisive world today. True to our modern incapacity for nuance, Smith’s “invisible hand” has come to symbolize a rather bleak view of the human spirit as bedeviled by inescapable selfishness. It originated the famous “invisible hand” metaphor for how socially beneficial outcomes can be traced back to the self-interested actions of individuals. The great Scottish moral philosopher, political economy pioneer, and Enlightenment maven Adam Smith (June 16, 1723–July 17, 1790) is best known for authoring the 1776 masterwork The Wealth of Nations - a foundational text of behavioral economics two centuries before behavioral economics existed. But it was another visionary economist, as far from hippie culture in both time and ideology as possible, that made the most convincing case for this very concept two centuries earlier - a mind, paradoxically enough, presently celebrated for just about the opposite sentiment. Schumacher in his timeless clarion call for “Buddhist economics,” penned amid the hippie counterculture of the early 1970s. “Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies,” wrote the economist E.F.
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