>
> I tell you, every time someone cites another passage it brings out for me
> just how wonderful a writer Smith was. He was one of the greatest
> non-fiction stylists the English language has ever produced. It's a
> mountain of a book on the driest of topics and yet almost every paragraph is
> a physical pleasure to read.
Tony Aspromourgos, a prof here at Sydney, recently put out a new book on Smith focusing on these distributional questions. In his preface he quotes (an English translation of) a Chinese translator of the Wealth of Nations: "When I read the text, in some places it is so moving that I cannot keep from crying. Alas! how touching Smith's sentences are!" I'm not that moved, but he is a pretty witty writer, and it is an awesome work on the sociology of 18th century Britain as much as it is economics.
Mike Beggs