Excerpt from Wealth a Brief Explanation of the Causes of Economic Welfare The really fundamental questions of economics are why all of us, taken together, are as well off - or as ill off, if that way of putting it be preferred - as we are, and why some of us are much better off and others much worse off than the average. I am convinced that immense harm is c.done by the common assumption that the- answers to these questions are so obvious and easy that no general treatment of them is necessary. We should not tolerate a person who professed to explain the inefficiency of some locomotive and to provide a remedy for it, if we knew that he had never studied mechanics and was quite; ignorant of the construction and working of locomotives. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.