Source: EconLog
by Jacob Sider Jost
“Smith’s famous sentences about the butcher, brewer, and baker have often been taken to place interest (often silently emended to ‘self-interest’) at the root of human activity. Gregory Mankiw’s widely used introductory economics textbook glosses them in just this way: ‘Smith is saying that participants in the economy are motivated by self-interest.’ Smith could have said this. His famous sentences might have read ‘The butcher, brewer and baker provide us with dinner not out of benevolence, but out of self-interest. They act not out of humanity, but out of self-love, and seek their own advantage.’ But this is not what Smith wrote.” (03/20/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/bargaining-with-the-butcher-baker-and-brewer