Many experts, like Senior Editor George Church, are drawn to their disciplines irresistibly by the forces of supply and demand. "The reason I began reporting business," Church admits, "was that I heard the Wall Street Journal was hiring people with no experience." Thus in 1954, Church began his apprenticeship on the Journal, reporting on the food and textile industries. "I found myself far more fascinated with business than I had expected," he recalls. "It requires the type of mind that enjoys puzzles--the more pieces, the better." Since joining TIME in 1969, Church has unraveled economic enigmas in dozens of lead articles and cover stories, among them award-winning studies of "Inefficiency in America" (March 23, 1970) and "Can the World Survive Economic Growth?" (Aug. 14, 1972). But none of his assignments have been as global as the subject he tackled for this week's cover story: the future of capitalism as it approaches the bicentennial of its manifesto, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

The story involved the type of heuristic thinking Church enjoys most. How, for example, have capitalist societies drifted into what Smith would have regarded as an unnatural combination: inflation in the midst of recession? Has Smith's "invisible hand" of supply and demand lost its grip? To find the answers, Church and Reporter-Researcher Valerie Gerry plunged into Smith's opus and the works of capitalism's later exegetes. "It was a crash course in all those people everybody quotes but nobody reads," Gerry explains. "We treated Adam Smith and our previous cover subjects, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, as news sources." Gerry also interviewed dozens of living experts, including the members of TIME'S Board of Economists. Meanwhile, correspondents in the U.S. and Europe reported the views of both friends and foes of the system, ranging from Milton Friedman to Herbert Marcuse. Ironically, the enemies of capitalism seem to have more faith in its adaptability than some of its proponents. One forceful advocate of the system, Senior Editor Marshall Loeb, who edited the story, considers flexibility one of capitalism's greatest strengths: "It's a difficult system to analyze, and as revolutionaries have discovered, even more difficult to overthrow, because it's dynamic by nature--it has its own revolutions already built in."

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