Adam Smith

Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1723 and nearly abducted by gypsies as a child, which he later said would have made a poor philosopher of him. He studied at Glasgow and Oxford, where he found the professors doing nothing and getting paid well for it, an observation that sharpened his later thinking on incentives. He became professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he lectured on ethics, jurisprudence, and economics as parts of a single subject. The Theory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759 and made him famous. The Wealth of Nations, published on the same day as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, made him immortal. He spent his last years as a customs officer in Edinburgh and burned sixteen volumes of manuscript on his deathbed.