Adam Smith's Warning About Wealth, Fame, and Status (with Ross Levine)
4/20/20261 hr 4 min
What can Adam Smith teach us today? In this conversation between Ross Levine of Stanford's Hoover Institution and EconTalk's Russ Roberts, Smith emerges as a penetrating psychologist who understood that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth but for respect--and that this hunger, left unexamined, leads individuals and societies alike into serious trouble. The discussion moves from the personal (why do highly successful people keep grinding long after they've "won"?) to the political: Smith's sobering warning that when a society admires wealth and power for their own sake, it breeds servility and undermines freedom. Along the way, there's a Marxist father reading Smith during COVID, a Nobel-adjacent economist who couldn't understand why anyone would bother with a 1759 book, and a childhood story about loyalty and friendship that cuts to the heart of what we may have lost in modern culture. This is a conversation about how to live well--using one of history's greatest thinkers as a guide.
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First 90 secondsRuss Roberts· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to EconTalk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to two thousand and six. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. [upbeat music] Today is March tenth, twenty twenty-six, and my guest is economist Ross Levine, the Booth-Derbes Family Edward Lazear Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-director of Hoover's Financial Regulation Working Group. Prior to joining Hoover, he was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Ross, welcome to EconTalk.
Ross Levine· Guest1:00
Oh, it's great to be here, Russ.
Russ Roberts· Host1:02
Our topic for today is Adam Smith. Today is March tenth. Yesterday, March ninth, was the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations. And Ross, you decided to honor this anniversary year in an unusual way. Describe the project which you call From the Hand of Adam Smith.
Ross Levine· Guest1:24
So I decided that it was the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,