Great Scot

The Daily Record and STV are seeking nominations for the greatest Scot, to be announced on STV on St. Andrews Day. Whilst the panel have included Edinburgh Festival director Jonathan Mills and Record editor Bruce Waddell, two people I've never heard of, they've chosen to leave out Mary Queen of Scots. However, regardless as to whether some of the people who are on the list actually belong there, for me the question of who was the greatest Scot does not require too much of an inquiry.

Adam Smith, who thankfully has been nominated onto the list, and as the founding father of capitalist economics is the Scot who has had the greatest effect in world history. Smith's promotion of the division of labour, an idea which was exported around the world, drove the industrial revolution. For without the division of labour, the industrial revolution could never have happened, and the raising of standards of living to the levels they are today, along with it.

It is Smith's an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which espoused the division of labour to maximise efficiency and criticised the corrupt system of govenment sanctioned monopolies within the mercantile system of the day, and not James Watt's steam engine that was the greatest driver of industrial growth. To Smith, an individual acting in their own interest and selling and buying freely, would lead to the most efficient economic system. Prices would reach an equilibrium, being led by the invisible hand of the market, through supply and demand, and competition between enterprises.

However Smith was not overly right wing, he saw Government regulation as necessary to prevent monopolies and conspiracies which would stifle competition. Furthermore he was, unlike many of his class of the day, concerned with the problems of poverty. Smith argued that it "is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." An idea which most modern readers will subscribe to, but which, at the time, made his ideas, considering his target demographic, revolutionary to say the least.

Smith also espoused universal education as a bulwark against what Marx would later call alienation through the process of the division of labour, and it's soul destroying monotony. At the time of writing Scotland was unique in the world, in that every Church parish, under the reforms of John Knox, employed a teacher to educate boys of all classes, and the four Scottish universities of the time took educated young men of any class, with scholarships and charitable foundations to assist with the cost. Smith was uniquely placed therefore, to see the advantages to society of universal education first hand.

In short he is the Scot who has the greatest effect on world history, for there is not a corner of the world untouched by his ideas, and he deserves a good deal more credit than to be the first Scot to grace the back of an English banknote.