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Posts Tagged ‘Adam Smith’

Adam Smith on What We Should Strive For

Posted in Economics and Culture, Happiness, tagged , , , , on May 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Ross Levine wrote a series of imagined letters from Adam Smith’s perspective.

Why do we work so hard even after many of us have met our survival needs? Often it’s because we believe wealth brings admiration and approval from others. But admiration from others is fickle and not a source of lasting happiness.

What we really crave is to be worthy of admiration: “The love of praise seeks the opinions of others. The love of praiseworthiness seeks inner integrity.”

We should direct our ambition toward becoming worthy of our inner judge: “True satisfaction comes not from wealth, titles, accolades, or applause, but from acting in harmony with the impartial spectator’s standards.”

Back in university, I read several biographies of Adam Smith, along with his books and lectures, and came to admire his broad range of intellectual interests and his insights into human psychology. He and David Hume would be among my top choices for dinner companions.

PS: There’s a musical based on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Here’s a Freakonomics podcast interview with its composer, David Lang.

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Jane Austen and Adam Smith

Posted in Books, Happiness, Links, tagged , , on June 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Henry Oliver wrote an article comparing two of my favourite authors, Jane Austen and Adam Smith. Both have a deep understanding of human psychology and behaviour. I’ve admired Knightley’s and Darcy’s character and self-command ever since I read Jane Austen’s novels when I was young.

Excerpts:

Smith argued that people want to be praised and to be praiseworthy. That they want to be loved and to be deserving of love. Smith says we must be virtuous to be happy. His virtues are prudence, benevolence and justice. His vices are pride and vanity. “The proud and the vain man . . . are constantly dissatisfied,” he writes. The route to virtue is through “self-command”. Therefore we must achieve “superiority over the most ungovernable passions of human nature”.

Self-command is a question of willpower, education, habit. It comes from being bred in “the bustle and business of the world” when we are exposed to “violence and injustice of faction”. To those who are miserable, Smith advises in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “do not mourn in the solitude of darkness . . . Live with strangers, with those who know nothing or care nothing about your misfortune.” 

As the economists Bohanon and Vachris write, both Smith and Austen prioritise self-control as a means of achieving balance and self-improvement. By attaining the skill of self-command, Marianne is able to cultivate virtue.

What marks out the capacity to improve, in Smith, is being able to see ourselves as an “impartial observer” would see us…Emma is unable to improve morally until she takes Knightley’s advice. Like Marianne, she must learn to see like those with more self-command. It is when Emma sees things as Knightley does that she is able to reform. “I doubt whether my own sense would have corrected me,” she acknowledges to Knightley.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

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