That’s the subject of the November Adam Smith 300 essay, written by Ryan Hanley of Boston College. It’s adapted from his 2019 book, Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life. Check it out:
Our world values the trappings of wealth and fortune, the signs of success in modern markets. Yet while some wealth and fortune seems necessary for happiness, past a certain point more wealth and fortune doesn’t lead to more happiness, as we all know and much research confirms. So too, and as we have seen Smith emphasize, our world values signs of esteem and recognition: signs we can now more easily and precisely measure thanks to the metrics of social media. Yet these too seem increasingly unlikely to lead to happiness. And perhaps most interestingly, many in our world claim to value happiness above all else. But at least one effect of the pursuit of happiness is that those in the grip of that pursuit often become remarkably self-centered and less attuned to the happiness and well-being of others.
These features of our world are tied in large part to the emergence of what we today call capitalist society, and Smith himself called “commercial society.” Smith defended commercial society on the grounds of the significant material benefits it brings to the poorest among us, and history has vindicated him. The last 200 years have seen remarkable amelioration of global poverty — indeed to such a degree that in 2016 the United Nations adopted as the first of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals a total eradication of global extreme poverty by 2030. We cannot but be grateful for the progress that has enabled us to even conceive of this goal. But neither should we allow these welcome gains to blind us to the costs at which they have been bought. And if the gains are material, the costs are often moral, and include, among others, a rising sense of selfishness, isolation, and anxiety — phenomena pernicious to social trust and political order, but also to our efforts to live well.
You can read the whole thing here.