Wealth of Nations: Introduction and Plan of Work

In the introduction to the work, Adam Smith gives one basic contention about the overall productive nature of a society, namely that how much or how little a nation can produce is directly related towards its allocation of labor. He points out quite rightly, that a nation's wealth is basically untapped and unusable if there are no people there to exploit the resources and produce goods and services. Division of labor based on skills and judgment is key to exploiting the most production within a country. He also points out that because of that division you can have people who don't work at all enjoying relatively high standards of living because of the abundance of the nation's production.

The division of the book is also outlined. Book One is largely a discussion of how labor is divided, how wages and rents are determined. How profits work etc. Book Two is about financial systems. Book Three is about the rise of industry and the decline of agriculture since the fall of the Roman Empire. Book Four is a breakdown of the political economy of trade between nations. And Book Five is about the nature of taxation and fiscal policy. Of course he doesn't use those terms for half that stuff, but we'll see how it plays out.

I will say that the introduction is interesting in a historical context. He is describing things and concepts which now have concrete and defined terms. When he talks about the produce of a nation, we'd simply say GDP. It will get further interesting, to me at least, to see how he'll grapple with concepts like supply curve, demand curve, deadweight loss, or fixed and variable costs. Unfortunately this is only an introduction, and doesn't have much impact on how we view things in a modern context.