It is fascinating to realize that economists are essentially the unacknowledged poets of our world. Think about Adam Smith’s famous pin factory anecdote in The Wealth of Nations, where he described the division of labor across specialized workers producing tens of thousands of pins. Smith never even visited that factory! He actually borrowed the tale from Diderot, who got it from an engineer. Yet, as a prophet of capitalism, Smith used this regimented ballet of pin-makers to intuit the modern assembly line before the Industrial Revolution even took off. He crafted a powerful narrative, a fiction, that completely reshaped our reality. By conceptualizing the human soul as Homo economicus, chillingly self-interested and competitive, economists act like poets. They do not just calculate; they invent metaphors and stories that dictate how we live. #philosophy #economics #history