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

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.

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