Anne McElvoy and a panel of experts convened for a lively discussion on BBC Radio 4's Friday night ideas programme, Free Thinking, to dissect the concentration, distribution, and morality of wealth - both then and now. They took a nostalgic detour back to 1776, when Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a book that introduced concepts like free markets, the division of labour, and productivity, and basically gave capitalism its first user manual.
The guests included Vicky Pryce, economist and co-author of Mismanaged Decline: What Politicians Won’t Tell You About the Economy; Maha Rafi Atal, the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Glasgow, who is busy preparing for the 250th anniversary of Smith's magnum opus with a series of events; Dafydd Daniel, a divinity lecturer at the University of St Andrews; Allister Heath, a business journalist; and Hettie O'Brien, a Guardian writer and author of The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself. The episode was produced by Eliane Glaser.
For those still hungry for economic debate, the BBC also offers Start the Week, where Tom Sutcliffe recently discussed economic solutions with Mariana Mazzucato, Jeremy Hunt, and Patrick Foulis. Because nothing says 'Monday motivation' like a good old-fashioned economic crisis chat.