Adam Smith discovered a remarkable property of a competitive market economy. Under perfect competition and with no market failures, markets will squeeze as many useful goods and services out of the available resources as is possible. But where monopolies or pollution or similar market failures become pervasive, the remarkable efficiency properties of the invisible hand may be destroyed.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Adam Smith discovered a remarkable property of a competitive market economy. Under perfect competition and with no market failures, markets will squeeze as many useful goods and services out of the available resources as is possible. But where monopolies or pollution or similar market failures become pervasive, the remarkable efficiency properties of the invisible hand may be destroyed." in the context of "Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Economics (19th ed., 2009), Chap. 2 : The Modern Mixed Economy" to mean that wisdom is timeless.