bad, affect a great number of people down the line? In Smiths era, cause and effect had begun to wildly accelerate; incentives were mag- nified tenfold. The gravity and shock of these changes were as over- whelming to the citizens of his time as the gravity and shock of modern life seem to us today. Smiths true subject was the friction between individual desire and societal norms. The economic historian Robert Heilbroner, writing in The Worldly Philosophers, wondered how Smith was able to separate the doings of man, a creature of self-interest, from the greater moral plane in which man operated. "Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer," Heilbroner wrote, "and in this way to form a notion of the objective . . . merits of a case." Consider yourself, then, in the company of a third person-or, if you will, a pair of third people-eager to explore the objective merits of interesting cases. These explorations generally begin with the ask- ing of a simple unasked question. Such as: what do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?