Read Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ but don’t misread his Invisible Hand

The reality, though, is inconvenient. The most famous term in economics—the ‘invisible hand’—is perhaps also the most misunderstood. Smith used this phrase only three times in his entire published corpus. He never used it to describe the magic of the price mechanism. Instead, Smith’s ‘hand’ was a literary flourish borrowed, perhaps with a wink, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.