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William Watson: The two best things about Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

Praise for the majestic 18th-century sentences and acute insight into how the excesses of human nature can be disciplined by free markets

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When I was an undergraduate studying economics some friends baked me a cake, whether for a birthday or end of term I don’t remember. But instead of saying Happy Birthday! or Enjoy the Summer! the icing spelled out: “The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.” It seems I’ve been an Adam Smith geek for some time.

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The Wealth of Nations, which that famous sentence is from, was published 250 years ago next Monday. I still have the copy I read for class: hard cover, $5.95 new, 976 pages in the Modern Library Giant edition. The margins are extensively scribbled in, with many exclamation marks denoting delight. Key passages are enthusiastically underlined. A scarcity of annotation suggests I found less pleasure in Smith’s 90-page digression on “variations in the value of silver during the course of the four last centuries” or his “appendix on the herring bounty.” When, several decades later, I taught the same class, we skipped those sections.

The thing I like most about Smith is his language. AI says the average sentence in The New York Times is 15 words. The first sentence of the Wealth of Nations is 48 words. I selected a chapter at random and found its 8,361 words featured 249 periods, for an average sentence of almost 34 words. There were also 21 semi-colons. When teaching Smith I always began by showing the class Google Maps’ Street View of Kirkcaldy, the Scottish seaside town where Smith was born and raised. I fancied the rhythm of the waves rolling in from the North Sea subliminally set the cadence of his........

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