timelets

“Smith didn’t intend to call that underlying force in markets an invisible hand. He used the phrase only three times, across all his writings, ambiguously and inconsistently. (The first time, he used it as a sarcastic put-down of superstitious beliefs, a “mildly ironic joke.”) The hand metaphor had been used by many writers, and it was ignored, in the context of financial markets, for 170 years after Smith died,

until an economics textbook in the 1950s revived the phrase, imbued it with its current meaning, and attributed that meaning retroactively to Smith.”

--- Bahcall, Safi. “Loonshots."