Smith sees economic life, not as these abstract and impersonal market forces, but really about

contests and power and how power and institutions structure who gets what.

I'm Bethany McLean. Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea?

And I'm Luigi Zengalis. We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

And this is Capital Isn't, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?

And most importantly, what isn't?

We ought to do better by the people that get left behind.

I don't think we shouldn't kill the capital system in the process.

In 1776, a Scottish philosopher named Adam Smith published a sprawling,

and we mean sprawling, book about how nations become wealthy.

The appropriately named wealth of nations ran more than a thousand pages and ranged across

everything from the origins of money to the economics of apprenticeship to the fall of the

Roman Empire.

Today, most people associate Adam Smith with a single phrase, the invisible hand.

The crazy thing is that that phrase, the invisible hand. The crazy thing is that that phrase,

the invisible hand, appears only a handful of times in his entire body of work. And Smith wasn't

actually a gung-ho apostle of free trade. Glory Liu, who is an assistant professor at Georgetown,

writes in her book, Adam Smith's America, intellectual historians have long complained that, quote,

distorted notions of self-interest, free markets, and the invisible hand have eclipsed Smith's

moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and more. Which raises some interesting questions. How did such

a complicated thinker become reduced to a slogan or to absolutists. Along the way, there were other

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