Great Performance !

The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, modern capitalism was just getting under way. Smith was entranced by the sweeping changes wrought by this new force, but it wasn’t only the numbers that interested him. It was the human effect, the fact that economic forces were vastly changing the way a person thought and behaved in a given situation. What might lead one person to cheat or steal while another didn’t? How would one person’s seemingly innocuous choice, good or bad, affect a great number of people down the line? In Smith’s era, cause and effect had begun to wildly accelerate; incentives were magnified
tenfold. The gravity and shock of these changes were as overwhelming to the citizens of his time as the gravity and shock of modern life seem to us today.

Smith’s true subject was the friction between individual desire and societal norms. The economic historian Robert Heilbroner, writing in The Worldly Philosophers, wondered how Smith was able to separate the doings of man, a creature of self-interest, from the greater moral plane in which man operated. “Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer,” Heilbroner wrote, “and in this way to form a notion of the objective… merits of a case.”

Consider yourself, then, in the company of a third person—or, if you will, a pair of third people—eager to explore the objective merits of interesting cases. These explorations generally begin with the asking
of a simple unasked question. Such as: what do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything