Which economist wrote the 1776 book 'The Wealth of Nations'?

The economist who wrote the 1776 book The Wealth of Nations was Adam Smith.

Smith was a Scottish economist and moral philosopher associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. The book’s full title was An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and it was published in London on 9 March 1776. It examined how labor, trade, prices, wages, profits, taxation, and government shape economic life.

Smith is especially associated with the division of labor, which he argued could dramatically increase productivity, and with the “invisible hand,” his famous metaphor for the unintended social effects of individual economic activity. However, the book is not simply a defense of unrestricted business: Smith criticized monopolies, political favoritism, colonial trade restrictions, and special interests.

A common mix-up is confusing Smith with Karl Marx, who wrote Capital nearly a century later and developed a powerful critique of classical political economy. John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo were also major economists, but both came after Smith and did not write this 1776 work.