Adam Smith Lives!

Freakonomics and Adam Smith?

I'd never have guessed it -- but then again, I'm not surprised -- but an interview by Diane Sawyer of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner ends with what sounds very much like a stripped down version of Smith's sympathy.  The discussion turns to honesty.   Diane Sawyer points out that we're less likely to steal from someone we know.  ok. Hume's sensible knave comes to mind.  Then the discussion moves to those dishonest acts, and the "social incentives" that affect them.  Levitt says we can "work on" the 10 % of our actions that might be dishonest:  "It's not wanting to appear ... to others and to yourself to be greedy" that influences these actions. 

Why don't we want to appear to others and to ourselves as dishonest?  That's precisely the role played by Smith's partial and then the impartial spectator, by Smith's imaginative process that makes us moral. 

Sympathy, praiseworthiness, and Smith

Sue Anne Pressley's Sept. 16 article in the Post brings the element of blame or, what Adam Smith calls praise worthiness to the fore:

The element of worthiness -- or lack of it -- is also at work.

"Certainly a piece of this is the attribution of blame, that Katrina victims are unlucky, they were living in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Sam Marullo, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgetown University. "The institutional poor we have here in D.C. and every other city around the country, there is a sense that they are at fault . . . they didn't do something right, they didn't get an education, they didn't follow the rules."

The article contrasts the treatment of Katrina victims by Americans with that of our homeless.  Some of the contrast is attributed to ideas about blameworthiness:  any of us might be victims of weather; the homeless, so the argument goes, are more blame worthy than Katrina's victims. 

Adam Smith certainly recognized the power of praiseworthiness in the imaginative process that generates sympathy for our fellow human beings (see TMS, part III).  The Bleak House images from the 19th century reinforce that people bring presuppositions about praiseworthiness or lack thereof to an event like Katrina or homelessness.  One of the lessons we've seen in the last few weeks is that the presumption of lack of praiseworthiness can lead to tragic results:  indifference and inaction.  We've also seen that the presuppositions are starting points:  large numbers of Americans who initially were inclined to blame those who stayed behind have, thankfully, come to revise their judgements concerning blame worthiness of the victims.  Those who advocate on the behalf of the homeless have had a much more difficult time changing perceptions.  The National Coalition for the Homeless tries; read this.

Sympathy, Katrina and doing something

When I first started thinking about Adam Smith, sympathy and Katrina, I had in mind the idea that the act of changing positions imaginatively one with another -- putting ourselves in the place of someone trying to decide, as the weather predictions were coming in, whether to leave a lifetime behind and flee -- makes us realize how similar we all are.  At any point in time outcomes differ, but those in large measure are determined by luck and history.  Abstract from luck and history and you've got similarity.  The act of stripping away luck and history isn't easy.  Hard to imagine that you might actually function on some level pretty much the same way as does a person without a car, family, or much of anything.  Watching, reading, listening to those who stayed behind makes it easier to imagine and, as Smith argued, we come to realize the essential similarity.

David Levy and I made that point in a recent paper in Economics and Philosophy.  We argued that people trade not only "stuff" or goods but also "approbation" -- a measure of our sympathetic standing one with another.  If so, we argued, people will refrain from taking advantage of weaker sorts even when there are no present or future (monetary) rewards to be had for doing the "right thing".  Thinking of the flipside of this, Smith may also have found an explanation for the outpouring of help now occurring for Katrina's victims.  We help the victims because we come to realize they're like us and so we can imagine how they would regard our actions.  We earn approbation by doing what we imagine they'd want us to do (and, since they're like us, that imagining is what we'd want someone to do to us).  We might get approbation directly from them, but we also earn self-approval, the knowledge that we're doing the "right thing" that comes from our own self imagining what they will think of us when we offer help to them.  And we're horrified -- as Smith's European is -- by the thought of doing nothing.

Sympathy, Smith and Katrina

As I said earlier, I've been at a week long seminar for the 2005-6 class of ACE Fellows.  Our schedule kept us busy for 16+ hour days, but we had time to speculate about Katrina.  Before Katrina struck, a "progressive" colleague (his description) remarked that anyone who stayed deserved whatever outcome s/he got, and that, anyway, we subsidized their living on the coast in LA (or NC and elsewhere).  No one in the group, myself included, objected.  We were unable to imagine why anyone wouldn't leave the city when officials told them to go.  Today, almost a week later, I've come to regret that failure of imagination on my part and I imagine my friend would regret his.  The stories and the images we've had from Biloxi, New Orleans, and elsewhere, make it pretty clear that there but for the various accidents of life goes me, or any of us. 

I've now had plenty of opportunities to put myself in the shoes of the people who stayed, and -- though I'd like to think I'd have had the resources and the wherewithall to leave -- I can imagine readily enough that I might have stayed. 

There's something about that act of imagination that makes us the same.  That's Adam Smith's incredibly powerful point.  The passage about the European and China is most telling.  I'll reproduce the beginning -- the problem -- and the end here, because it's often truncated in the literature so that the solution (giving up the finger) is lost on the reader who doesn't know the original.

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. ... If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it.

(The Econlib site has more...!)  And, if you've not yet donated to the Katrina victims, you can do it here...