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William Watson: Smithian curiosity keeps economics moving ahead

The fundamental question raised — what are the effects of people pursuing self-interest? — continues to drive the discipline

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All the fuss about the 250th anniversary of the Wealth of Nations, fully justified in my view, may have left some people wondering whether economics, a discipline that sometimes presumes to be a science, really ought to give such weight to a contribution from 10 generations ago. Do physicists still read Faraday? Or chemists Lavoisier? Historians of science certainly do. But haven’t most sciences moved on? Do people still preach from these early contributors’ gospels, as we conservative columnists so often do from Adam Smith?

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