The People's Economics

Adam Smith is well known for his Wealth of Nations, but this book was written considerably earlier. Now it often happens that when an author puts forward an argument in one book, it is necessary to respond to criticism in a later book. Typically the second book will be somewhat longer, as it needs to go into greater detail. Now The Wealth of Nations goes into a lot of details about various topics in economics, and so I wondered: What if The Theory of Moral Sentiments was Adam Smith putting forward his ideas, and The Wealth of Nations was mostly there to expand on some of them. So I thought I ought to read this book

The book seems rather slow moving and ponderous, so maybe it's unlikely that it will introduce ideas in a compact form which are then developed in The Wealth of Nations. I can see what Smith is getting at though. We have natural sympathy with the feelings of others, but the amount of sympathy depends upon what in particular they are feeling. We have great sympathy for those afflicted by grief, but less fellow feeling for those pleased with themselves, and may even be somewhat envious of those who have done well. I hope that the rest of the book speeds up a bit.