Adam Smith Lives!

Lionel Robbins, Nature and Significance of Economic Science

Readers know that I studied with Sam Hollander.  Perhaps because of this, I have long felt that Sam's teacher, Lionel Robbins, deserves more recognition than he has been given by the profession.  So I am very pleased that N&S is now 75 years old; we can use the occasion to celebrate Robbins and to sort out just what he said that was so important. Frank Cowell and Amos Witztum have sent the HES list this announcement of the upcoming Robbins conference at the London School of Economics.   

A Conference on

The Nature And Significance of Economic Science

75th Anniversary of Lionel Robbins’s Essay. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Lionel Robbins’s Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. The Department of Economics at LSE and the editors of Economica are marking the event by a conference and a special issue of the journal. The purpose of this conference is to renew the considerations of Robbins’s theme and reflect on the current nature and significance of economic science as well as examine Robbins’s own position from a historical perspective.

Speakers include: Tony Atkinson, Ken Binmore, Lawrence Blume, RichardLipsey and Robert Sugden

The Conference will take place at LSE on 10-11 December 2007.

There are no conference fees. Participation includes luncheon on bothdays of the conference and a conference dinner on Monday, 10/12.However, there are a limited number of places and registration is on the basis of first come first served.

You can obtain your registration form and examine the programme of the conference at:

http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/_new/events/lionelrobbins/

Leo Thorsness -- modern day hero

Yesterday we took Colonel Leo Thorsness, leader in Residence at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, to the airport.  Before this, he spent 2 1/2 days with our faculty and students -- talking to newly admitted Jepson students about his days in Hanoi Hilton, to students in our Foundations classes, ethics, and Don Forsyth's Group Dynamics class, and so on.  Lunch with ROTC students at UR; pizza with Richmond College men.  Dinner for our Jepson Forum event, Ronald Takaki. 

Throughout, Colonel Thorsness' message is courage, "do what's right, help others", and -- here the leadership lesson emerges -- people will follow you if you this is your mantra.  If it's not, they won't.  He told us about how the men at Hanoi Hilton stripped the leader -- ranking officer -- of his rank because he had given up on this motivational mantra and become a broken man.

Is there a link to HET?  Economists today rarely talk about the motivational force that a good leader generates.  But Adam Smith knew about such things.   In a paper I presented at the International Leadership Association 2 weeks ago, David Levy and I made the case that, for Smith, the approbation that comes from "doing the right thing", being praiseworthy, motivates leaders and then their followers.
Here's a key passage that makes the case that a leader, motivated by equality, was able to command a rather large number of supporters at Culloden.  My grandmother was a MacLean (of Duart); David's a Cameron.   Here's what Smith has to say about leadership:

It is not thirty years ago since Mr. Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochabar in Scotland, without any legal warrant whatever, not being what was then called a lord of regality, nor even a tenant in chief, but a vassal of the Duke of Argyle, and without being so much as a justice of peace, used, notwithstanding, to exercise the highest criminal jurisdiction over his own people. He is said to have done so with great equity, though without any of the formalities of justice; and it is not improbable that the state of that part of the country at that time made it necessary for him to assume this authority in order to maintain the public peace. That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with him. (Smith WN: B.III, Ch.4).

HE position at James Madison

Barkley Rosser, at JMU, has posted this note at the HES list:

I am pleased to announce that there is a tenure track, assistant professor job opening availableat James Madison University, for which the primary field desired is history of economics, with other fields with that being anything (although we are also hiring in public economics separately).  We are looking for somebody interested in teaching history of economic though on about an annual basis. 

If you or somebody you know might be interested, please check out our ad in the October JOE, or contact Prof. Ehsan Ahmed at [email protected]  We will be interviewing at the ASSA meetings in New Orleans, and the deadline for applications is December 1.

Eugenics resurfaces

David Levy and I recently wrote this in the wake of James Watson's recent resignation:

Watson’s remarks call to mind debates in the 19th Century over Ireland and the West Indies. There, too, the debate centered on the seemingly simple question of whether the Irish (or the former slaves in Jamaica) were as intelligent as the English. In “What is to be Done with Ireland” and other articles, the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill argued that the Irish were inherently no different from the English. The soon-to-be forgotten co-founder of eugenics, W. R. Greg, argued that the Irish were inherently different, “idiosyncratic.” For Greg, different meant inferior.

 

On the policy side, the debate fits with Watson’s statement as well — if the Irish were inferior to the English, then English social and economic policy wouldn’t work there. Something else had to be devised.

 

Eugenics was one answer that gained currency for well over a century. Not surprisingly, Watson has also come out in favor of eugenics.

Though we don't say this in the article (see the link below), it is interesting to note that Watson's reputation apparently survived his earlier remarks on eugenics. 

You can see the full article from the Providence Journal Bulletin, here.