Adam Smith's Warning About Wealth, Fame, and Status (with Ross Levine)

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.9	Today is March 10th, 2026, and my guest is economist Ross Levine, the Booth-Durbus family, Edward Lyser Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-director of Hoover's Financial Regulation Working Group.
0:51.3	Prior to joining Hoover, he was a faculty member at the University of California
0:56.4	at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Ross, welcome to Econ Talk. Oh, it's great to be here,
1:02.4	Russ. Our topic for today is Adam Smith. Today is March 10th. Yesterday, March 9th, was the 250th
1:10.6	anniversary of the publication of the wealth of nations.
1:14.2	And Ross, you decided to honor this anniversary year in an unusual way. Describe the project,
1:20.4	which you call from the hand of Adam Smith. So I decided that it was 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and more importantly,
1:31.8	for an economist, the publication of the wealth of nations.
1:36.8	And so I was asked to write something about the U.S. independence, and I propose that I write a monthly letter from Adam Smith to
1:48.7	America in 2026. And so the purpose of the letters is to be very true to Smith, but written in a way
1:58.6	that is easy for somebody to read when they're waiting online.
2:04.9	And as you know very well from your own writings, Smith is oftentimes invoked and simplified and
2:13.9	caricatured, but he's such a complex, insightful scholar, psychologist, and political scientist
2:23.9	that I thought he would have a lot to offer to many of us today.
2:30.3	And I love this project.
2:32.8	I tried to do something similar with my book,
2:35.0	how Adam Smith can change your life, but these are shorter and they're very readable.
	...

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