The father of economics tried to refund his students, and they refused
When Adam Smith quit his Glasgow chair halfway through a term in 1764 to tutor a young duke, he offered his students their fees back. They would not take the money. The same scrupulous professor had once been punished at Oxford for being caught reading David Hume.
Nobody knows Smith's birthday. He was baptised in Kirkcaldy, Fife, on 5 June 1723 by the old calendar, two months after his father, a customs comptroller and lawyer, had died. His biographer John Rae reported that at three he was briefly carried off by Romani travellers until rescuers intervened. After the Kirkcaldy burgh school he entered Glasgow University at 14 and studied under Francis Hutcheson, who argued that labourers deserved pay enough to keep a family, an idea Smith later built into his account of natural wages.
A Snell Exhibition took him to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1740, and he loathed it. He later wrote that most Oxford professors had abandoned even pretending to teach, blaming rich endowments that freed them from needing students. Officials reportedly confiscated his copy of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature; he taught himself from the Bodleian's shelves, developed shaking fits, and left in 1746 with his scholarship unfinished.
Public lectures in Edinburgh from 1748, backed by Lord Kames, went well despite his weak delivery, and in 1750 he met Hume, a friend for life. Glasgow gave him a logic chair in 1751 and then moral philosophy. His 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments grounded morality in mutual sympathy, close to what we now call empathy, and drew wealthy students from abroad. In his lectures he increasingly argued that labour, not a hoard of gold and silver, makes a nation rich, a direct challenge to mercantilism.
Tutoring Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch, paid £300 a year plus a matching pension, about double his salary. Bored in Toulouse, Smith started writing a book to fill the hours. In Geneva he met Voltaire; in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and the Physiocrats around François Quesnay, whose system he judged the closest thing to truth yet published on political economy. Back in Kirkcaldy from 1766, he spent roughly a decade on The Wealth of Nations. Published in 1776, it sold out its first edition in six months and set out the division of labour, absolute advantage and the case that competition and self-interest can generate prosperity. He died on 17 July 1790.
Source: Adam Smith
