Wealth & Money Quote by Adam Smith

Adam Smith lands the jab softly, which is exactly why it stings. He isn’t condemning wealth for enabling comfort or security; he’s diagnosing how wealth curdles into performance. The “chief enjoyment” isn’t the thing itself, but the social theater around it: being seen having it. “Parade” is the tell. It frames consumption as spectacle, a public ritual meant to produce admiration, deference, envy, or at least recognition. Smith’s target is status, not satin.

The subtext is that markets don’t just distribute goods; they distribute attention. Riches become a language, and the rich speak it fluently because everyone else is forced to listen. Smith, often flattened into a cheerleader for self-interest, is more psychologically and morally alert than that caricature. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he treats human beings as creatures hungry for approval, shaped by the “impartial spectator” in our heads. This line is that argument sharpened into social critique: many people don’t want money as much as they want the feelings money can reliably purchase from other people.

Context matters. Smith is writing in a Britain where commercial life is expanding, class markers are both destabilizing and newly purchasable, and “taste” becomes another battleground. If riches are increasingly mobile, then the urge to signal them intensifies; parade is how new money secures old-world legitimacy. The sentence also anticipates a modern anxiety: when wealth is measured in visibility, the economy rewards not just production, but display.