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Authors: P.J. O'Rourke

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CHAPTER 2
Why Is
The Wealth of Nations
So Damn Long?

So we sit down to read, load our lap with the case-of-Scotch weight of Adam Smith's opus, and crack open
The Wealth of Nations
to page 1 of so very, very many pages. And we find ourselves in a position of intellectual embarrassment more blush-inducing than mere disagreement with Smith's logic and common sense. We face the Quantity Query. It occurs to most readers of most great works (often late at night before an exam). Even a devout biblical literalist at a conservative Baptist seminary must privately speculate upon it while wading through the
begat
s of 1 Chronicles. And I am, or on my good days I like to think I am, a devout advocate of free markets. But
The Wealth of Nations,
in my Modern Library edition, is nine hundred pages plus preface, editor's introduction, and appendix.

I've been told that one of the pleasures of middle age is getting to read the classics again, now that, almost forty years after my last college class, I've forgotten enough about them. I'm supposed to gain new, adult perspicaciousness from Plato's
Dialogues;
discover a fresh, mature appreciation of
Paradise Lost
, and experience, as a grown man, unremembered wonders in
The Wealth of Nations
. That includes wondering
if I ever actually read it. I quiz myself frankly: is it the Monarch Notes that I've forgotten?

Be this as it may, another pleasure of middle age is that as the face reddens more with rum blossoms it reddens less with chagrin. I am now willing to pose the question that, as a student, I didn't have the nerve for. Imagine, in a graduate seminar on George Eliot, summoning the courage to ask, 'Why is
Middle-march
so damn long?'

The simplest reason for Adam Smith's lack of economy with words was, aptly, economic. When
Wealth
was published it sold for one pound sixteen shillings. By Smith's own estimate the 'ordinary wages of labour'
1
at the time were ten shillings a week. Consumers, even well-off consumers of intellectual luxury goods, demand good weight. Hoist Bill Clinton's
apologia pro vita sua
, which could have been summed up in a few choice words.

The Libertarian Reader,
published by the Cato Institute in 1997, did just that for Adam Smith, making his essential points in seven and a half pages of excerpts from
Wealth
. When David Boaz, executive vice president of Cato and editor of the
Reader,
was writing the introduction, he put in something to the effect that each original work from which material had been drawn could be enjoyed in its entirety. 'No, no, no, not
The Wealth of Nations
!' said Tom Palmer, senior fellow at Cato and resident expert on Adam Smith.

Smith's genius was to establish economics as a scientific discipline, distinct from the unruly jumble of the mental and material worlds that we encounter in the actual economy. But
it doesn't take much of an economic encounter to bring every other scientific discipline jumbling down on our heads. Consider the psychology, sociology, political science, and mechanical engineering involved when we find that our five-year-old has left Wal-Mart with an unpaid-for My Little Pony. Adam Smith was as willing as my crying child and I are to stray from strictly economic points. Here he is, 230-odd years ahead of himself on why Angelina Jolie makes a discreditable amount of money:

There are some very agreeable and beautiful talents of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration; but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered … as a sort of public prostitution … The exorbitant rewards of players, opera-singers, opera-dancers, &c are founded upon … the rarity and beauty of the talents, and the discredit of employing them.
2

It is this sort of thing that makes the 892½ pages of
Wealth
that aren't included in
The Libertarian Reader
worth reading.

Or some of them. Tom Palmer isn't wrong about the slogging involved in a real perusal of
Wealth
. Not all of Smith's asides involve opera-dancers cavorting to the music of Monteverdi, presumably in scanty costumes. There is, for instance, the sixty-seven-page 'Digression concerning the Variations in the Value of Silver during the Course of the Four last Centuries'. Here yeoman service is done in the cause of quashing the idea that a certain commodity possesses a fixed value, or that we'd want
it to. But to those uninterested in the historiography of currency supply, it's like reading
Modern Maturity
in Urdu.

The very largeness of his subject may have circumscribed Smith's desire to edit. And at age fifty-three, considering himself to be in poor health when
The Wealth of Nations
was published, Smith may have thought he wouldn't write another book. He didn't. Tom Palmer calls it, 'the kitchen sink effect – he had a lot to say and here was his big chance.'

The eighteenth century was a time of clarity of expression – a respite from the euphuistic blithering that went before and the romantic blather that would come after. But the Enlightenment style, though clear, was diffuse. A digression, if worthy-seeming, was not considered a distraction. It was thought of the same way twenty-first-century mothers with careers think of multitasking. And the pace of reading was more leisurely in the 1700s. There wasn't much on TV.

Edmund Burke, who could wander away from a subject with the best of them, wrote in a letter to Adam Smith, 'You are in some few Places, what Mr. Locke is in most of his writings, rather a little too diffuse. This is however a fault of the generous kind, and infinitely preferable to the dry sterile manner, which those of dull imaginations are apt to fall into.'
3

General literacy was a relatively new thing in Smith's time, and the dry sterile manner of modern economics textbooks had yet to be dully imagined. The printed word was closer kin to the spoken word. And speaking was still a source of entertainment. Today no Michelin Green Guide would give an extra star to a restaurant that hurried its diners through a five-course meal
in twenty minutes. For the same reason eighteenth-century speakers – and, by extension, writers – were not celebrated for brevity. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but
The Wealth of Nations
was no joke. Anyway, a taste for brevity is a recent fashion. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address received a tepid response at Gettysburg. And semiliterate and subliterate types still enjoy a good stem-winder on AM radio or in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.

Smith was a practiced public speaker. He began his career, in Edinburgh, giving paid talks of the intellectually improving kind. He spent thirteen years lecturing at Glasgow University, first as professor of logic and then as professor of moral philosophy. And lecture was what he did do. Professors in the 1760s didn't just throw questions open to classroom discussion, then go around saying, 'I learn more from my students than they learn from me.' Form following function, Smith adhered to the rule of all instructional adepts: say what you will say, say what you do say, say what you did say.

According to one of Smith's pupils, John Millar, a future professor at Glasgow himself, Smith's delivery 'was plain and unaffected … As he advanced, however, his manner became warm and animated, and his expressions easy and fluent.'
4
Or, as we would put it, he talked his head off. More correctly, he could be said to have talked his head full. Smith's Glasgow lectures have survived only in reminiscences and two incomplete sets of student notes, but there is evidence he was shaping his ideas for
The Wealth of Nations
as he talked. Formal prolixity extended to his private chats. A friend of Smith's reported, 'I have often told him after half an hour's conversation, "Sir, you
have said enough to make a book."'
5
And so, at times, the book Smith made reads like an FBI wiretap transcription, except with deeper thoughts and no swear words.

'Said enough to make a book' is also a fitting comment because Smith probably dictated
The Wealth of Nations
. He claimed he found penmanship slow and difficult, and the poor script and tardy replies of his personal correspondence demonstrate it. The natural verbosity of dictation may have made
Wealth
longer, but we shouldn't complain. Most writers talk too much and often expend what brilliance they possess on their palaver instead of their writing. We have Smith's brilliance on the page, in contrast to Samuel Johnson's. We must go to that toady Boswell for Dr Johnson's lively talk, which is not so well represented in the Doctor's sometimes deadly prose and poetry.

Another reason for the expansive nature of
Wealth
was Smith's Jamesian effort to qualify his statements in order to produce the exact hue and tint of meaning he desired. Of course Smith was dealing with reality and not a male old maid's maunderings about the wispy moods of bored rich people. Plus Smith's sentences end before the cows come home. And when the end of an Adam Smith sentence has been reached, sense has been made. For example, a passage from the aforementioned digression on silver:

Labour, it must always be remembered, and not any particular commodity or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities.
6

This can be powerfully condensed: 'Labour … is the real measure of … value.' In quoting Adam Smith, '…' is sometimes the most trenchant thing he said. And it may be that just such a trenchant ellipsis in
The Wealth of Nations
was what sent Karl Marx off his rocker. Notice, reading Smith's original sentence, that no grand Marxist 'value theory of labor' was created. The more so because, three hundred pages later, Smith makes the same kind of argument about food grains: 'The real value of every other commodity is finally measured and determined by … the average money price of corn.'
7
Smith thus maintains that work (or something akin to it, such as our daily bread) provides a sensible index for determining how much other things are worth to us. Deciding whether to mow the lawn ourselves or pay the kid next door to do it – factoring in the likelihood that he'll eat us out of house and home at snack time and run the Toro over his foot, sue us, and we'll have to get a second job to pay the legal bills – is something everybody does all the time. Marxism, as various Marxist regimes have discovered, is something nobody ever does if he can help it. (Incidentally, if the labor theory of value were true, certain children would be less worthless than they are.)

The labor that goes into a careful reading of
The Wealth of Nations
is repaid by the careful intelligence of the writing. And the reader discovers something else of value – something never hinted at by economists or scholars – Smith's sense of humor. Here is Adam Smith demolishing the notion that a nation should avoid importing goods that will be consumed and,
instead, hold onto its gold and silver money, because money has enduring value:

Nothing, therefore, it is pretended, can be more disadvantageous to any country, than the trade which consists in the exchange of such lasting for such perishable commodities. We do not, however, reckon that trade disadvantageous which consists in the exchange of the hard-ware of England for the wines of France; and yet hard-ware is a very durable commodity, and were it not for this continual exportation, might too be accumulated for ages together, to the incredible augmentation of the pots and pans of the country.
8

Where the labor of reading
Wealth
is not always repaid is in wading through the work Smith had to do to shape his field of thought. It's particularly difficult when Smith, the lonely pioneer, is sodbusting the vast untilled prairies of econometrics. There was hardly such a thing as a reliable statistic in the eighteenth century and certainly no set of them that went back for decades. By dint of prodigious reading and protracted correspondence, Smith could find numbers to confirm his theories. But each number had to be examined for quality and weighed for usefulness in comparisons. And we have to stay there with Smith as he sorts through these apples and oranges like the world's pickiest Jewish mother at the world's worst corner grocery.

Smith then subjected numerical data to graphical analysis without the one thing you pretty much have to have to do
this – graphs. The first useful graphic representations of statistics were drawn by Adam Smith's fellow Scottish economist William Playfair in 1786, in time for Smith's last revision of
Wealth
. And Smith knew Playfair, who was the young brother of a close friend. Alas, one genius didn't recognize another. Actually, two geniuses didn't. Of William Playfair's economics Jeremy Bentham said, 'Nine-tenths of it is bad writation.'
9
As a thinker, rather than a draftsman, Playfair was a tyro, but one wishes that Smith had paid attention to the callow lad anyway. Hundreds of pages of
The Wealth of Nations
that readers skim might have been condensed into several pages that readers skip entirely.

Another thing Smith didn't have, besides graphs, was jargon. Economics was too new to have developed its thieves' cant. When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence. He had to go on talking through his hat until the subject was (and the reader would be) exhausted.

But the book was going to be long in any case. The Enlightenment takes its name from what, in retrospect, seems to be a cartoon moment in intellectual history. Light bulbs – except they didn't have light bulbs – appeared over the heads of people like Adam Smith. They realized that the physical world was not a divine obscurity apprehendable only by prayer and holy contemplation. In other words, they realized that not looking at things was not the best method of looking at things. If you illuminated the machinery of nature with a little observation and thought, you could see how it worked. The universe was
explicable. And Enlightenment thinkers were – Prime Mover– dammit – going to explain.

BOOK: On the Wealth of Nations
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