Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1723, and spent much of his career as a professor teaching moral philosophy, not economics as a standalone discipline, since that field didn't really exist yet in any formal sense. He was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers including David Hume who placed huge value on reason, observation, and the common sense of ordinary people as guides to understanding the world. Before writing The Wealth of Nations, Smith had already built a reputation with an earlier book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored human ethics and empathy. The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, took the ideas he'd developed about human behavior and applied them to economic life, laying much of the intellectual groundwork for what would eventually become the modern field of economics. Smith is now widely regarded as one of the founding thinkers of capitalism, and his ideas about free markets, competition, and limited government continue to influence economic policy debates well into the present day.
