Adam Smith Visits Guyana

 

The Sunday Essay · Political Economy

Adam Smith Visits Guyana

The Wealth of a Nation Is Its People

Imagine the professor of moral philosophy landing at Timehri in the year his subject became urgent: barrels mistaken for wealth, a supermajor across the table, teachers in court, a ferry on the seabed. Smith left us four tests — and a fifth, from his first book, that matters most.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · August 16, 2026

I. The Professor Arrives

Let us imagine him stepping off the plane at Timehri: a stooped Scotsman of famously absent mind, a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, before economics emerged as a separate academic discipline. Adam Smith published two great books in his lifetime. The first, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was the work to which he returned repeatedly, revising it until the year of his death.^[2] We have spent two and a half centuries reading the second and misreading both.

He would come to Guyana in August 2026 as the ideal visitor, because Guyana in August 2026 is the world’s most vivid laboratory for the questions he actually asked. Not “how do markets work?” — that was never quite his question — but the deeper one: what makes a nation wealthy, and what makes wealth a blessing rather than a curse?

Drive him down the East Bank corridor and let the road itself pose the question. The cranes over the new hotels, and beside them the villages where the drains stand full after a morning’s rain. The container yards stacked with imported everything, and the schoolchildren threading through stalled traffic. Tell him the numbers as you drive: a country of fewer than one million people producing approximately 900,000 barrels of oil a day; one of the world’s fastest-growing economies; a country the World Bank now classifies as high-income, and which was, not long ago, counted among South America’s poorest.^[3][4]

He would be astonished. And then, being Adam Smith, he would look out the window and start asking what national wealth looks like from the ground.

II. What He Would Recognize

Smith’s great insight in The Wealth of Nations was that the wealth of a nation is not its treasure. This was his central polemic against the mercantilists, who measured national greatness by the gold and silver in the sovereign’s vaults. Wealth, Smith insisted, is the annual produce of the land and labour of the people — what a nation’s people can make, do, grow, teach, build, and exchange.^[1] Bullion is not wealth. Bullion is a claim on wealth, and a claim that evaporates if the productive capacities beneath it are never built.

“Substitute ‘barrels’ for ‘bullion’ and you have the sharpest one-sentence commentary on Guyana’s present condition ever written, composed 250 years before the Liza discovery.” — T.R.B.

Smith would look at the Natural Resource Fund and see the mercantilist temptation in modern dress: the belief that the fund is the wealth. He would say, gently but firmly, that the fund is merely the instrument. The wealth — if it comes — will be the teacher in Region One who was properly trained and properly paid; the rice farmer whose drainage works; the young engineer from Buxton or Bartica who can compete for work anywhere on earth. The annual produce of the land and labour of the people. The fund matters only insofar as it enlarges that capacity.

III. What He Would Suspect

Here we must correct the caricature. The Adam Smith of talk radio — apostle of the unregulated market, patron saint of the invisible hand — is a fabrication. The phrase “invisible hand,” upon which an entire popular mythology of Adam Smith has since been erected, appears exactly once in The Wealth of Nations.^[1] What recurs throughout the book is something else entirely: a deep, documented, almost prosecutorial suspicion of concentrated commercial power.

It was Smith who warned that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” It was Smith who observed that merchants and manufacturers, whenever they propose a new law or regulation, ought to be heard “with great precaution,” because their interest is “to widen the market and to narrow the competition.”^[1] And it was Smith who wrote the most devastating contemporary critique of the East India Company — a private corporation exercising quasi-sovereign power over a distant territory, and an extraordinary demonstration of what happens when commercial power escapes effective public discipline.

Show him the Stabroek Block production sharing agreement. Watch his eyebrows.

“Being pro-market is not the same as being pro-merchant. The market is a discipline; the merchant, left unwatched, is an escape artist from discipline.” — T.R.B.

Smith was no enemy of the company form, or of profit, or of foreign capital — he understood better than anyone how heavily the development of Guyana’s oil has relied on foreign capital, technology, and expertise. But he would insist on the distinction his modern impersonators erase: being pro-market is not the same as being pro-merchant. A small state negotiating with a supermajor is precisely the situation in which Smith would demand the strongest institutions, the most transparent accounts, the most jealous parliamentary oversight. He would read our Local Content Act with interest — and then ask who audits it, and how, and whether the answer would survive his famous skepticism.

IV. What He Would Ask About Wages

Smith reserved a special clarity for the question of labour. Masters, he observed, are “always and everywhere in a sort of tacit combination” to hold wages down — and because they are few, they combine easily, while workmen, being many, combine with difficulty and at legal peril. When workers ask for more, he noted acidly, we hear endless complaint about their combinations, “though we hear little of the masters’.”^[1]

One imagines placing before him the record of Guyana’s 2024 teachers’ strike: the High Court’s ruling that the strike was justified and the cessation of union-dues processing unlawful, later upheld on appeal; the dues still unremitted.^[5] Smith would not need the details explained twice. He would recognize the oldest pattern in political economy — and he would say what he said in 1776: that the liberal reward of labour is not charity but evidence. “It is but equity,” he wrote, that those who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should be tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged themselves. A country can cross the World Bank’s threshold into high income while remaining, by Smith’s more demanding measure, some distance from a flourishing society.

V. The Third Duty of the Sovereign

Smith assigned the sovereign three duties, and Guyanese readers should attend closely to the third. The first is defence. The second is justice. The third is “erecting and maintaining those public works and those public institutions” which the market will never adequately provide: roads, bridges, harbours, and, above all, the education of the people.^[1]

“A ferry is the third duty of the sovereign. A functioning school is the third duty of the sovereign. Maintenance — unglamorous, unphotographed, unribboned — is the third duty of the sovereign.” — T.R.B.

Public works and public institutions. Read that phrase on the Essequibo coast, within sight of where the MV Barima capsized and sank in July 2026, and it stops being an abstraction.^[6] A ferry is the third duty of the sovereign. A functioning school is the third duty of the sovereign. Maintenance — unglamorous, unphotographed, unribboned — is the third duty of the sovereign. Smith would have no patience for the notion that a state flush with petroleum revenue could plead poverty on precisely the obligations he placed at the core of sovereignty itself. Nor would he accept ribbon-cuttings as a substitute. He measured public works by whether they carried the commerce and the people safely, not by whether they impressed the visitor.

And on education he went further than almost any thinker of his century: the state, he argued, must ensure instruction even for “the common people,” because a people who cannot read, reason, and judge become “mutilated and deformed” in their capacity as citizens — incapable of seeing through “the interested complaints of faction and sedition.”^[1] Smith thought an educated citizenry was national security. Guyana, staking its entire post-oil future on the capacities of its children, has more reason than any nation on earth to agree with him.

VI. The Impartial Spectator on Water Street

But it is his first book that Guyana needs most. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that we judge our conduct well only when we can step outside ourselves and see it as an “impartial spectator” would — a fair-minded observer, neither our accomplice nor our enemy.^[2] Smith’s argument invites a larger political inference. Whole societies can lose this faculty. They divide into factions, and faction is fatal to impartiality: each side sees only its own injuries, hears only its own advocates, and mistakes the interest of its party for the interest of the nation.

He would recognize our condition within a day of arriving. He would listen to our public argument — every question of competence converted instantly into a question of allegiance, every critic branded a partisan, every defender deputized — and he would say that this, not the resource curse, is the deeper danger. Oil does not corrupt nations. Nations that have lost the impartial spectator corrupt oil. Petroleum does not create the quality of a nation’s institutions. It reveals it.

“Oil does not corrupt nations. Nations that have lost the impartial spectator corrupt oil.” — T.R.B.

The test he would set us is simple to state and hard to pass: Can Guyana build institutions that judge — contracts, wages, ferries, schools, accounts — as the impartial spectator would judge them, without first asking who benefits?

VII. The Professor Departs

At Timehri, waiting for his flight, Smith would offer no forecast. But he might repeat the sentence he set down in 1776, which reads today as if addressed to us by name: no society can be flourishing and happy of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

The barrels are not the wealth. The fund is not the wealth. The wealth of this nation is, and has always been, its people — their labour, their learning, their capacity to judge their own affairs with clear eyes.

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Adam Smith knew it in 1776.

The question of the decade is whether Guyana will govern as if it knows it too.

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References

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). “No society can surely be flourishing and happy” and the masters’ “tacit combination” on wages: Book I, ch. VIII. “People of the same trade seldom meet together”: Book I, ch. X, pt. II. Merchants’ proposals heard “with great precaution”: Book I, ch. XI. The invisible hand: Book IV, ch. II. The three duties of the sovereign, and the education of the common people (“mutilated and deformed,” “the interested complaints of faction and sedition”): Book V, ch. I. econlib.org
2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 6th ed. 1790). The impartial spectator: Part III. econlib.org
3. World Bank, Guyana Country Overview and FY2027 income classifications (2026). worldbank.org
4. Reuters, “Guyana set for bigger oil profits as ExxonMobil recoups initial costs,” July 31, 2026. reuters.com. See also OilNOW, “Vessel to push Guyana oil production past 1 million bpd weeks away from arriving,” August 2026. oilnow.gy
5. High Court of Guyana, ruling on the 2024 teachers’ strike and the cessation of union-dues processing (April 2024), and subsequent appellate proceedings; Guyana Teachers’ Union chronology letter, August 7, 2026.
6. Reuters, “Captain, crew members in deadly Guyana ferry accident charged with murder,” July 28, 2026. reuters.com

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