It is apparent that the concept of Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand has been stretched past its intended limits through various interpretations. In “The Wealth of Nations,” the metaphor of the invisible hand is used in the context of politics of economy where the authors tried to illustrate that under parallel economic environments, traders and investors will desire to use their resources for home trade as opposed to international investments. Smith uses the metaphor a second time in his 1776 book “The Wealth of Nations,” and this usage is the one that is applied in subsequent economic theories and models. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith talks about ‘the invisible hand’ that prompts a selfish landlord to give out a part of his harvest to his workers. In this first usage of the metaphor, Smith alluded to an income distribution model without reference to market environments. Smith then used the metaphor of ‘the invisible hand’ in his 1759 book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” The metaphor was first used in an uneconomical context in Smith’s essay on astronomy, where thunder and lightning were attributed to ‘the invisible hand’ of Jupiter. The phrase itself might have come from Richard Cantillon, another economist who used economic theories and models for application into his entrepreneurship. The Invisible HandĪdam Smith used the metaphor of the invisible hand in three different contexts. The metaphor of the invisible hand has been frequently misunderstood by various entities who have blamed Smith for perpetuating greed and individualism, but the economist meant that “individuals try to maximize their own good, and by doing so through trade and entrepreneurship, society as a whole is better off” (Brewer 521).
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