Lessons From Adam Smith’s Edinburgh and Paris

Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity.

Chelsea Follett — Mar 14, 2024

Summary: Amidst the turmoil of modern times, evidence reveals significant progress across various metrics, from rising life expectancy to declining global poverty. Cities have emerged as epicenters of innovation and progress throughout history, fostering collaboration, competition, and freedom of thought. By exploring the unique environments of cities like Edinburgh and Paris, where intellectual liberty thrived, Chelsea Follett uncovers the vital role of peace, freedom, and population density in driving human achievement and societal advancement.

This article appeared in Adam Smith Works on 2/8/2024.

Has humanity made progress? With so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealized golden age.

But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.

Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.

The origin points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. Why is that?

“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”

One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labor, more specialization, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”

A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centers. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?

That brings us to the next thing that most centers of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognized this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:

Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.

Of course, not all cities were or are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable center of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.

During the Scottish Enlightenment centered in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.

Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.

And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.

Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.

That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centers of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).

That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.

Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:

Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.

The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centers of innovation. Consider Paris.

As the capital of France, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐called Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.

Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐purpose encyclopedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes considered a counter‐Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticized view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.

The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.

And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.

By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.

Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.

World Health Organization | Pregnancy & Birth

Maternal Mortality Dropped Significantly from 2000 and 2023

Apr 10, 2025

“Between 2000 and 2023, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR, number of maternal deaths per 100 000 live births) dropped by about 40% worldwide…

eastern Europe and southern Asia achieved the greatest overall reduction in maternal mortality ratio (MMR): a decline of 75% (from an MMR of 38 to 9) and 71% (from an MMR of 405 down to 117), respectively. Despite its very high MMR in 2023, sub-Saharan Africa also achieved a substantial reduction in MMR of 40% between 2000 and 2023.

The greatest reduction in lifetime risk of maternal death during this period occurred in the region of central and southern Asia, with an 83% fall in risk from 1 in 71 in 2000 to 1 in 410 in 2023. In five regions, the lifetime risk of maternal mortality reduced by more than half: sub-Saharan Africa, northern Africa and western Asia, Australia and New Zealand, eastern and south-eastern Asia, and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).”

From World Health Organization.

UNICEF | Overall Mortality

The Downward Trends in Child Mortality

Apr 3, 2025

“In 2023, the global under-five mortality rate was half of what it was in 2000 – a remarkable achievement that reflects decades of sustained investment and collaboration by governments, donors, health professionals, communities and families…

Progress has not been uniform across all age groups. Since 2000, deaths among children aged 1–59 months have fallen by 58 per cent, compared to a 44 per cent decline in neonatal deaths. Nearly half of all under-five deaths in 2023 occurred within the first 28 days of life, underscoring the heightened vulnerability of newborns and the need for greater investment in targeted interventions during this critical period.”

From UNICEF.

Blog Post | Overall Mortality

Grim Old Days: Responses to Untimely Death in the Past

What did all-too-common child mortality mean to the people of history?

Chelsea Follett — Feb 28, 2025

Summary: Robert Woods’s book explores how parents and society mourned child deaths in an era when losing a child was tragically common. While some historians have suggested that frequent child mortality dulled emotional bonds, Woods presents evidence—from poetry, grave epitaphs, and personal accounts—showing that parents deeply grieved their lost children. Over time, increasing prosperity and changing social attitudes led to a growing cultural emphasis on childhood, shaping how families remembered and valued their children.

In his book Children Remembered: Responses to Untimely Death in the Past, British historian Robert Woods examines how adults reacted to the early deaths of children in a world where death in childhood was extremely common.

Woods seeks to answer questions such as: “Was the bond of emotional attachment between parents and offspring as close in the past as it is said to be today?” Or did sky-high rates of child mortality lead to diminished attachment and limited mourning of children who died? There has been considerable debate on this matter among historians. While some such as Philippe Ariès have theorized that parents were once largely indifferent to the loss of their offspring, others have critiqued this assessment. It is true that, numbed by frequent child deaths, parents often did not make as much of a show of their grief. Children died with such frequency that their graves often went unmarked. “Prior to the fifteenth century, children’s tombs either did not exist or were very rare,” Woods writes.

But although losing a child to death in infancy or early childhood was a common, indeed near-universal experience among parents, there is no reason to think that the loss was any less emotionally painful for all its ordinariness. The words of parents and other witnesses to early child death often suggest acute pain.

In the preindustrial age, almost all parents suffered the loss of a child. Woods notes that “infant mortality was by today’s standards very high in the early modern period. Approximately half of all live births never survived to age twenty. Most parents therefore experienced the death of their own children, probably more than once.”

The poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637) wrote touching poems about his deceased children, including these words for a son who died at age seven: “Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye / Ben. Ionson his best piece of poetrie.” Robert Herrick’s (1591–1674) poem “To the Lady Crew, upon the Death of Her Child”advises a mother not to weep, because her dead child is at least no longer in pain: “And (pretty Child) feeles now no more / Those paines it lately felt before.”

Looking at statistics and figures of infant mortality can give an idea of how horrifyingly frequent childhood death was in the preindustrial age. But reading firsthand accounts of grief conveys a vivid sense of what it was like to actually live in a world of such frequent early deaths. Examining the mourning poetry, including grave epitaphs, that adults composed for children in the early modern period is especially revealing.

Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers typically loved their children then as much as now, and their grief was correspondingly intense. Consider these lines from “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth” by a poet who lost several of her children prematurely, Mehetabel Wesley Wright (1697–1750), urging her day-old infant to look at her one last time before dying:

Ah! regard a mother’s moan,

Anguish deeper than thy own!

Fairest eyes, whose dawning light

Late with rapture blest my sight,

Ere your orbs extinguish’d be,

Bend their trembling beams on me!

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) composed the poignant “Epitaph on a Child”:

Here, freed from pain, secure from misery, lies,

A child, the darling of his parents’ eyes:

A gentler lamb ne’er sported on the plain,

A fairer flower will never bloom again.

Few were the days allotted to his breath;

Now let him sleep in peace his night of death.

Members of the nobility were not spared from the horrifically high rates of infant mortality in the preindustrial age. Elizabeth Egerton (1626–1663), an English countess, wrote a poem for her son Henry, who died at just 29 days old:

[He] lived dayes as many as my years,

No more; which caused my greeved teares;

Twenty and Nine was the number;

And death hath parted us asunder.

The famous poet John Milton’s (1608–1674) lengthy poem “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough” contains several passages that vividly portray the pain of losing a child, such as this snippet:

Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead

Or that thy corse [corpse] corrupts in earth’s dark womb,

Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,

Hid from the world in a low-delved tomb

English poet and painter Thomas Flatman (1635–1688) wrote lyrics for a pastoral song titled “Coridon on the Death of His Dear Alexis,” which reads in part:

Return, Alexis! O return!

Return, return, in vain I cry;

Poor Coridon shall never cease to mourn

Thy too untimely, cruel destiny.

Farewell forever, charming boy!

And with Thee, all the transports of my joy!

Even when poets wrote of such deaths in works of fiction, they often drew on their own all-too-real experiences of child loss. Flatman concluded an epitaph he wrote for his eldest son with these words: “Believe this, mortal, what thou valuest most, / And set’st thy soul upon, is soonest lost.”

Heartrendingly, the American colonial poet Jane Colman Turell (1708–1735) wrote of losing three children in a row, each pregnancy ending in a stillbirth:

Thrice in my womb I’ve found the pleasing strife,

In the first struggles of my infant’s life:

But O how soon by heaven I’m call’d to mourn,

While from my womb a lifeless babe is torn?

Born to the grave ’ere it had seen the light,

Or with one smile had cheered my longing sight.

Back across the pond, the English poet Elizabeth Boyd’s (1710–1745) poem “On the Death of an Infant of Five Days Old, Being a Beautiful but Abortive Birth” contains the lines,

How frail is human life! How fleet our breath,

Born with the symptoms of approaching death!

What dire convulsions rend a mother’s breast,

When by a first-born son’s decease distressed.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. (The words “tomb” and “womb” were frequently rhymed, as Woods observes.) Robert Burns (1759–1796) wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) wrote multiple poems to his deceased son, containing lines such as “My lost William . . . Where art thou, my gentle child?” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) poem “On an Infant, Who Died Before Its Christening” offers the lines, “Its head upon the Mother’s breast, / The baby bow’d, and went without demur.” Consider the pain captured by these lines from Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” (Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, the same year the playwright may have finished writing King John.)

Woods offers a detailed analysis of the poems and epitaphs in his book, noting that “deeper feelings of grief” are evident in poems where the subject is the writer’s own child or a close relative (as one would expect), and that the degree of grief does not seem to vary greatly with the child’s age or gender (perhaps surprising, as in the more sexist world of the past one might expect the loss of male children to inspire more intense grief).

While it is evident that most parents have always been fond of their children and mourned their loss, childhood was once not viewed as a particularly special or distinct part of life. Only around the time of industrialization did spreading prosperity give parents for the first time the means to indulge their children. The first hints of this change predate industrialization. Woods quotes the philosopher John Locke as observing that “children, in a sense, had become luxury objects upon which their mothers and fathers were willing to spend larger and larger sums of money, not only for their education, but also for their entertainment and amusement.” As people became wealthier, they increasingly took children’s well-being into account. Woods notes that “by the 1740s, a new attitude to children was spreading steadily among the middle and upper classes. This gentle and more sensitive approach to children was but a part of a wider change in social attitudes” that included growing empathy for women, enslaved people, and animals.

Paintings of individual children became more common in the 17th and 18th centuries than in the preceding ones, when such portraits were relatively rare. Seventeenth-century Holland, a remarkable society in many ways that some scholars identify as one of the geographic starting points of the Great Enrichment, produced an unusually high number of children’s portraits. “Many art historians have singled out seventeenth-century Holland as a . . . special case, particularly with respect to the popularity of paintings showing parents and children at home,” Woods writes. Children also came to more often occupy central rather than peripheral positions in family portraits. With such changes, “eighteenth-century artists gave new and special significance to the lives of children.”

Those children’s lives were, as Woods makes clear, often far too short.

IHME | Mental Health

Suicide Rate Declined by Nearly 40 Percent in Three Decades

Feb 27, 2025

“Over the last three decades, the global age-standardized mortality rate for suicide declined by nearly 40%, from about 15 deaths per 100,000 to 9 deaths per 100,000, indicating that intervention and prevention are working. For females, the rate declined by more than 50%, while it declined by almost 34% for males. Regionally, East Asia recorded the largest decline of 66% with China reporting the largest decline in the region.”

From IHME.