Was the young Adam Smith really the absent-minded professor he is often caricatured as by many of his biographers? Check out Professor Salim Rashid’s work-in-progress Young Adam Smith (SSRN), which explains why the conventional biographical picture of Adam Smith as a distracted or absent-minded academic is most likely totally wrong. Instead, Dr Rashid (Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; pictured below, top row) paints a much more sophisticated portrait of the Scottish thinker as a budding man of letters who was “worldly, worldly wise, and street smart”, which also happens to be the subtitle of his paper. Moreover, in making his case (a case that I find highly persuasive, by the way), Professor Rashid also identifies a plethora of “open questions” about many different aspects of Adam Smith’s biography, which is why, as I mentioned in two of my previous posts (see here and here), Rashid and I have agreed to join forces on a related project, tentatively titled “Die Adam Smith Probleme“. So, what are these additional open questions? Stay tuned: I will review Professor Rashid’s Young Adam Smith in my next two posts.