Word: wealth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Smith did not have it wrong. It's just that some of his self-proclaimed disciples have given us a terribly incomplete picture of what he believed. The man himself used the phrase invisible hand only three times: once in the famous passage from The Wealth of Nations that everybody cites; once in his other big book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments; and once in a posthumously published history of astronomy (in which he was talking about "the invisible hand of Jupiter" - the god, not the planet). For Smith, the invisible hand was but one of an array of interesting...
Hardly anything else in Smith's work is nearly that simple or consistent. Consider The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his long-neglected other masterpiece, published 17 years before The Wealth of Nations, in 1759. I recently cracked open a new 250th-anniversary edition, complete with a lucid introduction by economist Amartya Sen, in hopes that it would make clearer how we ought to organize our economy. (See a special report on important economists...
There are similar whiplash moments in The Wealth of Nations. The dominant theme running through the book is that self-interest and free, competitive markets can be powerful forces for prosperity and for good. But Smith also calls for regulation of interest rates and laws to protect workers from their employers. He argues that the corporation, the dominant form of economic organization in today's world, is an abomination...
...reason that many wealthy students don’t brag openly about their financial security is because it alienates their friends. Minimizing the impact of wealth differences among friends is crucial for sustaining community. Yes, some students can afford taking a taxi rather than the T, but does that mean they should abandon their friends and take the cab? Please...
...bought into a system set up to get you into an Ivy League college. Andrew got C's." Soon enough, Breitbart adopted the guise of skeptic and prankster, staging acts of subversion designed to win laughs and undermine the school's prevailing assumptions about wealth and meritocracy. It wouldn't be Harvard for this wiseacre. He was going to Tulane. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...