Unlike today’s public-finance economists, Smith understood that we are not rational utilitarian calculators. Indeed, that is why we have collectively done a very bad job so far in dealing with the enormous rise in inequality between the industrial middle class and the plutocratic superrich that we have witnessed in the last generation.
与今天的公共财政经济学家不同，斯密明白我们并非理性的功利算计者。事实上，这正是为何过去几十年来我们在处理产业中产阶级和富豪阶级不平等性日益严重的问题上屡犯集体错误的原因。