> "One upon a time there was a man who read the 'Wealth of Nations'; not
> a summary, nor a volume of selected passages, but the 'Wealth of
> Nations' itself. He began with the Introduction,
I didn't make it to the end of that quote, could you summarize it for me?
> - Glenn Morrow at the sequicentennial commemoration of the 'Wealth of
> Nations' - quoted in Mark Blaug's 'Economic Theory in Retrospect',
> 5ed., 1996: pp. 33-34.
That's funny. As I was reading the quote, I knew I'd read it somewhere before. So it's from Blaug. A few years ago I shelled out for a new copy of Economic Theory In Retrospect, which is still sitting on my shelf. I was dismayed by the preface which explained that the book is cumulative and therefore has to be read as a whole, sequentially. I was even more dismayed when I realized that it was true - you can't understand the chapter on Mill if you didn't read the chapter on Ricardo, etc. Reading the entire book seems only slightly less ambitious than reading all of the Wealth of Nations. As a result, I find it very difficult to extract any useful information from that expensive book at all - and yet I really, really want to know everything it says.
So could you summarize it for me?
SA