The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith, 1776 — economics.
The founding audit of how nations actually grow, published the year the American colonies walked out on its author's primary case study. Beneath the invisible-hand celebrity sits a predictive-behavioral text: Smith documents the systematic misestimation of risk — gains overvalued, losses undervalued, by every man in tolerable health and spirits — two centuries before behavioral economics measured the same tilt in a lab. And Book V closes with a sovereign-debt history whose finding has not aged a day: national debts, once accumulated past a certain degree, are never fairly and completely paid — they are defaulted on outright or liquidated by what he calls a pretended payment, which is inflation wearing a receipt.
Marked passages
The chance of gain is by every man more or less over-valued, and the chance of loss is by most men undervalued, and by scarce any man, who is in tolerable health and spirits, valued more than it is worth.
Book I, chapter X. Overconfidence documented as a human constant in 1776 — the mispricing every euphoria stage in Kindleberger's anatomy runs on, and the reason the engine reads bubble dynamics as recurring rather than remedial.
When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid.
Book V, chapter III. The base rate under every sovereign-debt projection on this site: resolution arrives by default or by debasement, and the historical favourite is the quiet one. Two hundred fifty years of subsequent data have added exceptions countable on one hand.
More on this shelf
- This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly — Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2009
- Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World — Liaquat Ahamed, 2009
- When Money Dies — Adam Fergusson, 1975
- Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises — Charles P. Kindleberger, 1978
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds — Charles Mackay, 1841
- Stabilizing an Unstable Economy — Hyman P. Minsky, 1986
- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — Niall Ferguson, 2008
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years — David Graeber, 2011
This text points at
The shelf exists because the engine reads it. See the Core, the projections, the sealed ledger, or all 81 texts.