Glory Liu loved David Lang's Wealth of Nations.

It exceeded all of my expectations.

It was urgent and curious and dark and heroic and hopeful.

I really did not expect to feel such a range of emotions.

She thought David Lang's piece avoided the usual traps.

It's so easy to get a one-sided version of SmithThe one that most people are familiar with, and I bet the one that most people walking in these doors had the expectation they were gonna hear.

The triumphant story of the invisible hand of the market over the heavy hand of government, that self-interest is the universal force of human coordination.

And yes, there are elements, right? But the fact that Lang was able to make that so much more complex, it wasn't a simple message.

So his writing wasn't treated like a religious text, more like a blueprint, perhaps.

Absolutely.

That's a great way of describing it.

You have people like James Madison who will say things like, "Oh, you know, I own this great text on political economy, and I'm a friend to commerce." The implication or the kinda subtext is, like, this was a smart man who wrote 900-plus pages about different ways to think about commerce, the relationship between agriculture and manufacturing, the conditions under which liberalized trade made sense versus prioritizing national defense.

This is the most sophisticated, most up-to-date analysis of what it means to be at the helm of a nation that cares about national wealth.

So it's natural that you have the founders, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, reading The Wealth of Nations to understand a way of thinking of national wealth.

[upbeat music]

Unpack that for me, please.

... "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." And I'm wondering how then this modern framing of him just ignored his deep suspicion of monopolies and consolidated corporate power.

Smith is so attuned to-Changing forms of power and new forms of power and new kind of interest group organization, if you will, to use some modern parlance that were happening in his time that were disrupting older forms of power and institutions that typically governed economic life.

In the mid to late 18th century, you have the rise of a whole new class of people, not the, like, nobility of the ancien regime, not the working poor, and not these artisans and light manufacturers, but a whole new class of people whose source of power is wealth, and it's wealth that's coming from things like capital investments and ventures.

They're people whose wealth is generated by a world increasingly connected by commerce.

It's these merchants and capitalists who are using their wealth as a lever of political power in a new way.

The lottery of birth doesn't matter anymore.

[laughs] Like, you could just take over a village, or you can take over and plunder another country and suddenly you have wealth, and that becomes a source of political authority.

[laughs]