This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 11th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Adam Smith was more than an economist, much more in fact.

Jesse Norman is a British MP and author of the new book,

Adam Smith, father of economics.

He discusses the contributions of Smith to not just economics, but also social psychology.

We spoke last month.

The headline for most people about Adam Smith is he's the father of economics.

If you took your one required economics course in college,

you probably learned about specialization and trade. And if you went a little deeper you may have read the theory of moral sentiments

and gotten sort of the more of the moral philosophy of Adam Smith. He had no patience for people who were

obsessed with trinkets. He spoke of how people don't just want to be loved,

they want to be loved, they want to be lovely, and sort of talked about in a sense sort of the

economics of social interaction and how we discipline each other to behave in ways that are maybe socially beneficial and arrive

at society in a very real sense and talked about that in a very

counterintuitive way. So in your view beyond the mere economics of Adam Smith, which were significant to say the least.

What was the larger project of Adam Smith?

Well, it's a fascinating question and thank you for having me along today to talk about it.

Smith isn't just the father economics, he's also the father of social psychology.

And one of the mistakes that people sometimes make

is they divorce the earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments,

from the later book, The Wealth of Nations Nations and that makes it impossible to

...