The Smith - North Chain in Context: Surfing in the Sea of Economic Ideas. On the 300 Th Anniversary of Adam Smith

The wealth of nations depends on labor productivity (total factor productivity); productivity - on differentiation of labor/specialization; differentiation of labor/specialization - on the scale of the market; the scale of the market - on the level of transaction costs associated with the use of this coordination mechanism; transaction costs - on the properties of institutions that also affect incentives and the ability of subjects to adapt to the changing circumstances of interaction. This is the Smith - North chain, which, denoting the fundamental cause-andeffect relationships in economics and placed in a broad context of economic development, allows us to show both the continuity and variability of ideas of economists who have been developing the subject of economics in the past 250-275 years, but at the same time left without due attention another outstanding work of Smith - “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”. In this paper, we consider the “Smith problem” and approaches to its resolution, indicate the feasibility of a substitute for the synthesis of research approaches, built on several fundamental principles that can be derived from a contextual discussion of the Smith-North chain. The shift of emphasis in organizing interdisciplinary discourse is an important condition for acquiring a new quality of economics knowledge growth.