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INTRODUCTION: Adam Smith was a social philosopher and economist who wrote two masterworks, The “Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the “Wealth of Nations” (1776). Adam Smith was born is Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on June 5, 1723 and was often called the founder of modern economics. At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to Glasgow university, studying moral philosophy under "the never-to-be-forgotten" Francis Hutcheson (as Smith called him). In 1740, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, but as William Robert Scott has said, "the Oxford of his time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework," and he relinquished his exhibition in 1746. In 1748, he began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames. Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres, but later he took up the subject of "the progress of opulence," and it was then, in his middle or late 20s, that he first expounded the economic philosophy of "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty" which he was later to announce to the world in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ANALYSIS: As a child, Smith showed an absence of mind, which wa