#WealthOfTweets in the classroom: Invisible Hand

Learners will use content from the #WealthOfTweets project in combination with excerpts from the original text of Wealth of Nations to analyze the original text before practicing expressing the ideas in progressively shorter formats. Once learners have wrangled the text themselves, they will be asked to explain why they agree or disagree with its representation in the #WealthOfTweets project. 

The material that can be used with this lesson strategy is appropriate for high school or college-level English, economics, civics, and history classrooms as well as in writing workshops. 

One class period to introduce the lesson. After this, you may ask learners to write their summaries one at a time (each summary as a single homework assignment) or to produce them all at once. You may choose to debrief learners after each writing assignment or after all writing assignments are complete and before the debrief questions are considered.

This lesson may be taught using a slide deck, handouts, or both.

The "invisible hand" might be the most famous metaphor in economics. But Adam Smith only used it twice in his books. Once in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The invisible hand draws our attention to a curious phenomenon. Sometimes when people are pursuing only their self-interest, it can lead to outcomes that are beneficial to everyone. This exercise breaks down the nuts and bolts of the more famous of the two key passages from Smith's work: the one in Wealth of Nations. 

Materials

“I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
- Blaise Pascal

Introduce the lesson to your learners using the above quotation. Explain to them that it is nearly always harder to express ourselves with few, simple words than it is to use long, drawn-out explanations.

Adam Smith’s most famous book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (usually just referred to as The Wealth of Nations), is very long. Many parts of it are repetitive and wordy. It is perfect for illustrating this concept!

Adam Smith was careful with his language (he was a professor of rhetoric and belles lettres long before he wrote The Wealth of Nations), but many of his ideas could be expressed more simply. 

AdamSmithWorks took this to heart when they decided to tweet the whole book. Introduce the resources to your learners (available in a handout or online). 

Introduce the concept of Roman numerals to your learners, since they are used in the text. A “cheat sheet” handout is provided.

This activity uses the #WealthOfTweets project and the original text from The Wealth of Nations to practice expressing complicated ideas concisely. 

Explain to learners that it will be up to them to decide how to summarize the text. Don’t think of it as a “right” or “wrong” summary. Rather, learners should be able to explain why they thought the parts they chose to summarize were the most important parts of the text. This will help them learn to identify the most important message in a piece of complex writing and to rank the importance of different pieces of information provided.

Ask learners to read the tweets provided, then set these aside. 

Ask learners to read the corresponding text from The Wealth of Nations provided. 

Learners will write a 500–750 word summary of the original text, then save this summary to submit.

Learners will shorten their summary to 300 words or less, then save this summary to submit.

Ask learners to express the most important ideas from the original text in a series of “tweets”, or short statements that are 280 characters or less. There is no limit on the number of tweets they can use, but each idea should be expressed in a single tweet. (You may provide them with the website https://charactercounter.com/twitter to check the length of tweets.) Ask your learners to submit these tweets as well. 

Review the assignment with your learners using the following questions. These can be discussed in class or submitted as another written assignment.

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Want to get more in-depth in your collaborative discussion of the invisible hand? Try this exercise from our Pins, Pencils, and the Invisible Hand lesson plan, which also incorporates the Invisible Hand passage in Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Working together, students can make sense of the original text that is too difficult to tackle independently. Use these guided worksheets for group readings of a passage from one of Adam Smith's books. Have students work together to identify and define words they don't understand, then make sense of phrases they find confusing and the overall passage.

Groups may come together as the full class after these discussions to compare their understanding of the passages and work through discussion questions.

Worksheets for reading original passages containing the invisible hand in its original context, with questions for discussion. We suggest 30–60 minutes for group reading per worksheet. Economic concept and discussion questions can be used in-class or as homework.
  Extension material
  Guided reading of the passage with the invisible hand in the Wealth of Nations
  Guided reading of the passage with the invisible hand in The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Recommended: Debrief with students after the readings. What worked well in their groups, and what would they change next time? What (if anything) about group reading helped them learn? What was most difficult about it? How will they approach passages they don't understand in the future?