In thinking about the spread of economic ideas, we must first consider the state of economics and what ideas economics has to convey. While I was mulling over these issues, I was reminded of the characterization of the political situation in one of the Balkan countries as “serious but not hopeless.” In economics, the situation is perhaps the opposite: hopeless but not serious. Much of economics is so far removed from anything that remotely resembles the real world that it's often difficult for economists to take their own subject seriously. Publishers have sometimes asked why we economists don't write as if we were intellectually engaged; why don't we produce books about the marvels of our science? The answer is simple. Economics doesn't have much to marvel at. Once you've got beyond some elementary arguments, it's as though most of economics dealt with footnotes to material that has already been spelled out a hundred years ago.

How many grand ideas are there in economics that are worth talking about? How much of economics is just dressing up common sense in difficult language? How many footnotes do we need? Adam Smith's contribution to economics is important not in terms of technical detail but because he indicated the solution to a paradox: How can an economy where people are turned loose on one another – an economy which is driven by competition and greed – yield any kind of order if no one directs it? Adam Smith's great accomplishment is to have provided a Newtonian picture of the economic system.