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Every age has its idols. In mine, people bowed too readily before titled ranks and inherited wealth.
In yours, the forms have changed, but the impulse is the same. You lift your eyes toward those who glitter—toward fame, fortune, spectacle, and status—and treat their visibility as proof of merit. Your admiration is powerful; it shapes your culture, your politics, your institutions.
And when admiration goes wrong, entire societies lose their moral and political bearings.
So permit me to ask a simple, unsettling question: Are you admiring the right people?
This is an imagined letter from Adam Smith to the Americans of 2026. The letters in this series are constructed from Smith’s own words and ideas, primarily those in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. All quotations are verbatim; paraphrases are faithful to Smith’s views. Interested readers can learn more about the sources here.
The question
In my first book, I made a troubling observation:
“We admire, and almost worship, the rich and the powerful, and neglect persons of poor and mean condition.”
This tendency, I wrote, is:
“the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
By this, I meant something simple and dangerous: When we revere the rich and powerful, our judgment goes blind. We praise what does not deserve praise and overlook the quiet virtues that keep a free society whole.
When admiration is misplaced, your moral compass tilts—and when your moral compass tilts, your society loses its bearings.
Why admiration goes astray
Why does this happen?
Because appearances strike faster than judgment. Wealth looks like success; power looks like superiority. As I once wrote,“[T]he respect we pay to wealth and greatness, when compared with the respect we pay to wisdom and virtue, is altogether disproportionate.” By “greatness,” I meant what you would now call power—the ability to command attention, rank, and influence. Meanwhile, the honest, the prudent, and the benevolent labor unnoticed, for virtue seldom advertises itself.
Your world is no less vulnerable. You see applause and assume merit; you see visibility and assume virtue. Your mind leaps to admiration long before it pauses to ask, ‘Is this person actually good?’ Showiness wins the race before judgment even begins.
But admiration given for the wrong reasons is not merely inaccurate—it can quietly undo the very conditions that keep a society free.
Why misplaced admiration endangers a free society
You may think this misjudgment is a harmless social habit. It is not. It threatens the foundations of a free society.
Allow me to explain.
First, misplaced admiration distorts political judgment.
When wealth and celebrity command more respect than wisdom and character, unworthy leaders rise. Not the prudent, but the prominent. Not the just, but the loud. And once elevated, such people seldom govern with restraint.
Second, misplaced admiration bends justice—the impartial rules that limit coercion, fraud, and abuse.
When society instinctively reveres the wealthy and powerful, their faults are excused, their vices minimized, their abuses rationalized. Meanwhile, the missteps of the modest are condemned harshly. Justice becomes unequal—tilted toward those whose wealth and power dazzle most brightly.
As I wrote, without justice, society will “crumble into atoms.”
Third, misplaced admiration corrupts incentives.
People pursue what society praises. If admiration attaches to power and display, many will chase power and display—even at the cost of integrity. People—especially the young and ambitious—learn to imitate those who glitter, not those who are good.
Finally, misplaced admiration breeds servility.
People grow deferential to those above them and negligent toward those beside them. A free society cannot endure when its citizens reserve their highest praise for splendor rather than for virtue.
Misplaced admiration is how free societies lose their footing—quietly, gradually, almost without noticing it happen. A nation cannot remain free and prosperous if it forgets how to admire wisely.
A misconception about me
Some of you may find this surprising. Later generations have painted me as a defender of greed—as if I believed the pursuit of riches were the true engine of prosperity. Of all the errors attached to my name, none is greater.
I never praised greed. I warned against it.
Markets flourish not because people are greedy, but because justice channels ordinary self-interest toward mutual benefit. Justice prevents coercion, fraud, and stealing, so that exchanges are voluntary—and voluntary exchange is what turns one person’s gain into another’s gain as well.
By self-interest, I mean the ordinary desire to better one’s condition within the bounds of justice and social propriety; by greed, I mean the pursuit of gain without regard to those bounds. Greed corrodes the very moral sentiments that make markets possible. It undermines trust, invites exploitation, and bends institutions toward the powerful.
Self-interest is useful.
Greed is destructive.
And admiration of greed is fatal to a free people.
A better standard of admiration
Even when public admiration wanders, each of you carries a better guide. I called it the impartial spectator—the quiet observer within each of us who judges not by splendor but by propriety, justice, benevolence, and self-command.
This inner spectator is not dazzled by wealth nor intimidated by rank. It weighs motives rather than appearances, character rather than fame. If you let this spectator shape your admiration, you will admire more wisely—and strengthen the society around you.
A final word
My friends, a free society stands or falls on the wisdom of its admiration.
Revere the wrong people, and you lose not only your liberty but, in time, the prosperity that liberty alone can sustain.
A society rises—or sinks—to the level of what it chooses to admire.
Admire wisely. Your future depends on it.
Your humble servant,
Adam Smith
Ross Levine is the Booth Derbas Family/Edward Lazear Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-director of Hoover’s Financial Regulation Working Group. He is a founding member of the Hoover Program on the Foundations for Economic Prosperity. Levine is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.