What's the best business book ever written? Alan Malachowski considers an old classic

These days, many business books are like junk food. They're fun. But, if you consume too many, you end up kind of queasy. Not so Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, a new edition of which was published last year.
At the basic level, its low-key, unhurried, meandering, detailed, and empirically loaded prose serves as an antidote to the boastful, unconsciously anxious, vapid abstractions of junk speak.

Smith shows us that it's possible to deal with complex issues without having to chop them up into inane bullet points. He further demonstrates that human beings are capable of understanding long sentences containing more than one substantive idea.

If you are one of the old-timers who remembers Thatcher and Reagan, The Wealth Of Nations can serve an additional mind-cleansing purpose. You were probably weaned on the notion that Smith is the father of capitalist greed. But, when you rediscover the context in which his views on self interest, division of labour, and free trade are expressed, you will be forced to drop that misconception. As PJ O'Rourke noted in his book, On The Wealth of Nations, Smith "was trying to better the economic condition of ordinary people."

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is published by Harriman House