Adam Smith Lives!

Adam Smith, Happiness and Commercial Life

Smith continues to be an inspiration for economists who work in the history of ideas.  A conference this week end, however, seeks to reclaim Smith's insights for political and social theorist.  Columbia University's Seminar in Political and Social Thought is sponsoring "Reclaiming Adam Smith" with papers by Emma Rothschild, Sam Fleischaker and others.  Papers can be downloaded only by members.  Gavin Kennedy at ASLL has promised various reports!  At APSA, Dennis Rasmussen has a paper on how and whether the Smithian impulse to "better our condition" really makes us better off.  In Rasmussen's view, Smith's argument was that though we rail against commercial society for making us continually toil, we fail to see how the desire to better our condition -- though never entirely fulfilled -- leads us to lives of relative security, liberty, and even happiness.

Malthus at Marginal Revolution

Not surprisingly, Tyler Cowen gets Malthus pretty much right at Marginal Revolution.  He begins with what David Levy and I have written at Econlib -- that Malthus was no Dismal Scientist but instead allowed for foresight to intervene between population pressure and starvation -- and then moves on to the overriding role of God (or providence) for Malthus:

I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin's theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices.  He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists.  To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws.  But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal.  I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament.  He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.

Anthony Waterman and Samuel Hollander have both written a good deal on how scarcity is a moral issue, one that raises questions about the beneficence of God.  Hollander writes:

There are then two theological Malthuses at work, one proposing the ideal solution to the problem of the threat of poverty created by potential population pressure; and the other, warts and all, and arriving at a wholly difference set of recommendations.  ... The vision [in 1803 and thereafter] was a bright one, not a dismal one, for 'the evils resulting from the principle of population have rather diminished than increased, even under the disadvantage of an almost total ignorance of their real cause.  The original theological problem had thus been entirely superannuated by events; and the revised theological problem of the need for the 'painful' check of chastity before marriage was merely theoretical, considering the ongoing acceleration of the national product, or, at worst, a problem for some distant future. (Hollander 1997, pp. 942, 947-8).

Smith, the Stoics and the self

An overly long hiatus.  First, a week of still camping and canoeing at Algonquin Park.  Afterwards, a college-decreed move back to the building in which I'm normally housed, newly-renovated and still chaotic.  Then, too, I was a bit discouraged about how the history of the discipline is treated (or not) at small liberal arts colleges and universities across the country.  That's not my subject today, however.

David Levy and I have been working on a paper on Smith's sources.  It's been good fun, not the sort of thing where we document this person just before Smith who said something akin to Smith.  Instead we've explored Smith and the Stoics, arguing in particular that his analytical egalitarianism -- street porter = philosopher -- has roots in the stoic tradition that respects the opinions of ordinary people.

I particularly liked this bit from TMS, where from our understanding of the beneficence of the world order comes our obligation to just acts even when simple "utilitarian" considerations argue against this:

One individual must never prefer himself so much even to any other individual, as to hurt or injure that other, in order to benefit himself, though the benefit to the one should be much greater than the hurt or injury to the other. The poor man must neither defraud nor steal from the rich, though the acquisition might be much more beneficial to the one than the loss could be hurtful to the other. The man within immediately calls to him, in this case too, that he is no better than his neighbour, and that by this unjust preference he renders himself the proper object of the contempt and indignation of mankind; as well as of the punishment which that contempt and indignation must naturally dispose them to inflict, for having thus violated one of those sacred rules, upon the tolerable observation of which depend the whole security and peace of human society. There is no commonly honest man ... who does not inwardly feel the truth of that great stoical maxim, that for one man to deprive another unjustly of any thing, or unjustly to promote his own advantage by the loss or disadvantage of another, is more contrary to nature, than death, than poverty, than pain, than all the misfortunes which can affect him, either in his body, or in his external circumstances. Smith (1759, iii i ¶ 48)

I've not worked this out fully but I think it relates to the self in economics -- see the last post.  David and I are now taking up the issue of the transition from how the self sees others in small groups/orders vs. organizations in F. A. Hayek.