Eric Schliesser on Adam Smith’s Warnings About Inequality

Some 300 years after his birth, Adam Smith remains a towering figure in economic thought — and one whose ideas are often oversimplified. While Smith is rightly remembered as a champion of free markets, he also wrote extensively about those left behind by unfettered capitalism, articulating a moral philosophy not nearly as well known as “the invisible hand.”

Eric Schliesser is a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam. His book, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker, reintroduces contemporary readers to a forgotten side of Smith, one interested in inequality and political power. Schliesser speaks with host Steven Durlauf about this aspect of Smith’s work, as well as the decline of the economist-as-moral-philosopher.