The Invisible Hand (After Adam Smith)

The Invisible Hand (After Adam Smith) uses convex mirrors to spell out “the invisible hand” in braille. The phrase appears in Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, where the economist speaks of the “invisible hand of the market.” He proposes that an individual’s self-interested actions will inevitably also benefit the community, and implies that markets, if left alone, will self-regulate. Smith suggests that the ideal market is blind in the same way that justice should be blind or unbiased. Convex mirrors are intended to function as a kind of all-seeing eye. They can often be encountered in retail contexts where they serve the purpose of theft prevention.