Smith's Approach Research Articles

David Hume's Invisible Hand in The Wealth of Nations : The Public Choice of Moral Information

110 DAVID HUME'S INVISIBLE HAND IN THE WEALTH OF NATIONS THE PUBLIC CHOICE OF MORAL INFORMATION Introduction The thesis I shall defend is that there are systematic aspects of Adam Smith's economics which make little sense when read in isolation from a literature in which David Hume provides the signal contributions. Consequently, parts of Hume's own work are stripped of meaning, isolated as they are from later developments. The puzzles about Smith's analysis which I find illuminated by Hume's are the following: 1. Why does Smith both defend the importance of economic growth for the material of well-being of the working class and claim that property originates as spoil, impoverishing the working class? After all, in the classical system the existence of property is one requisite for economic growth. 2. Why does Smith exalt the assumption of self-interested behavior in private activity but claim that irrationality dominates the political process? 3. Why does Smith deny the importance of benevolence in Wealth of Nations and insist on the importance of morality Sentiment morality in Theory of Moral its?3 The three questions have a common feature: they are related to the question of how public goods are provided. The particular public good in question is the institution of private property. As with all true I am obligated to the Center for Study of Public Choice for generous support of my research. Suzanne Levy gets the credit for the extent to which this approaches English. I have benefited from acute comments from Charles Rowley and Charles Griswold. The errors and obscurities which remain are solely my responsibility. Ill public goods, society considered as a whole benefits from having such an institution, but each individual considered separately can gain by anti-social behavior.4 Public goods provide a considerable difficulty for any social institution; neither competition in the market nor government requests that individuals reveal how much they wish to be taxed are certain to be efficient. There are aspects of the classical economic analysis which stress the importance of moral information as a partial solution to the public goods problem. By "moral information" I only require that the theory is employed as a guide and that if an individual acts contrary to the theory, this choice is not cited as "falsifying" the theory. Rather, something is said to be "wrong" or "wicked" about the choice.6 Much of modern economic analysis assumes that individuals have perfect information; this postulate rules out any significant role for moral information in the provision of the public goods. To avoid assuming away such a role for morality, we will drop the perfect information assumption and then examine if we can make sense of the classics' attack on the public goods problem. Of course, the specification that individuals see their own interests very poorly is consistent with Smith's general approach. The technique employed below is to look at the issue which Hume and Smith addressed as a problem in modern economics. The key difficulty is to determine under what conditions moral information could guide individuals with very imperfect perceptions to maximize their utility. In particular, suppose we find that moral guidance tells an individual how efficiently to produce. Is this morality self-enforcing or are resources required to persuade people to act in accord with these teachings? If resources are required, we will not pay much attention to just how this persuasion 112 is provided, e.g., whether we tell people that theft is "evil" or whether we hang a few thieves. General production theory tells us we probably will do both, but this is a separate issue. The argument to be advanced is that moral information has self-enforcement properties in private activities but these properties are missing in public activities. In this account, then, real resources will be required for implementing the morality. This consideration in turn raises an interesting issue. If the government expends these resources, what reason is there to believe that they will be provided to serve the public interest and not the interest of the government? Is it possible that the government can prosper by keeping people ignorant or by giving them advice...

Military expenditure and capitalism: a comment

Dr Smith's article on 'Military expenditure and capitalism' concluded that, 'although the simple underconsumption argument is inadequate, it remains true that military expenditure is necessary for the maintenance of capitalism as a viable international system' (Smith, 1977, p. 76). It is not at all obvious that this conclusion follows from either the analytical framework or the empirical results presented by Dr Smith. Our purpose is to seek clarification and to suggest an alternative paradigm and some pre liminary empirical results for the UK.f The aim is to contribute to a constructive debate on a subject which has been relatively neglected by UK economists. As liberals, we use a different vocabulary. Terms such as 'the balance of class forces', 'the real decision-makers', 'the ruling class', 'workers' and 'capitalists' are concepts which need defining, with the author showing how they relate to the estimating equa tions used in the article. Nor does it follow that having shown the inadequacy of the underconsumption argument, this confirms that 'military expenditure is necessary for . . . capitalism'. Dr Smith's methodology requires the specification of a set of distinct Marxist predictions which are capable of being refuted. Otherwise, there is a danger that he will derive non-testable hypotheses (beliefs) or even accounting identities consistent with a variety of explanations. For example, it is maintained that balance of-payments deficits can be 'remedied by some combination of reductions in military expenditure, reductions in utilisation by other means or direct state intervention' (pp. 73-74). What does the Marxist view predict about the specific mix of policies and especially the extent of reductions in military expenditure? In the UK substantial defence cuts have occurred under both political parties, which creates doubts about any unique power of the military to maintain budgets (this is not to deny that any monopoly bureau might be 'too large'). Moreover, as Dr Smith admits, time series data show a negative association between GDP and the shares of military expenditure (p. 66 fn). If we are trying to explain military expenditure using a theory of the state, how does Dr Smith's approach explain such expenditures by non-capitalist states? One possi bility is that UK and USSR defence expenditures are positively associated, although, as Dr Smith recognises, this prediction is not specific to Marxist models. In addition

The influence of a great pathologist: a tribute to Ernest Goodpasture.

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 16 · Number 3 · Spring 1973 THE INFLUENCE OF A GREAT PATHOLOGIST: A TRIBUTE TO ERNEST GOODPASTURE* SIR MACFARLANE BURNETI I was greatly honoured to give the Abraham Flexner Lectures here some 11 years ago, and I believe what I said in those lectures has made its own little impact on the history of immunology. We both enjoyed greatly our 1958 stay in Nashville with our host, the late Dr. Sam Clark, your then professor of anatomy. It gave us a unique opportunity to feel the quality both of Dr. Sam himself and of the South that he loved and made alive for us. At that same time, Dr. Goodpasture, full of years and honours, had after a distinguished retirement career at Washington returned to Nashville and Vanderbilt for a few years of Indian summer in his old laboratory. I met him briefly 6 years before on an earlier visit to the United States in 1952. Those two occasions gave me a fleeting opportunity to savour the personality of the man I want to honour in this lecture. The last writing I read of Goodpasture's was his tribute at the funeral of his old friend Sam Clark, with the note on the reprint that Dr. Goodpasture had himself died a few weeks later. They were two very notable men of differing but wholly compatible personalities. Both were ardent lovers of Vanderbilt and the South, and, if in my mind I tend to fuse the memories I have of the two of them, I think both would have forgiven me. It was a great privilege in 1958 also to know the third of the great figures who had built the Vanderbilt medical school, Dr. Morgan, then just retiring from the chair of medicine. * Editor's Note—This manuscript was prepared to be the first Goodpasture Lecture at Vanderbilt University in 1969. Sir Macfarlane Burnet was not able to deliver the paper .-D.J.I. t School of Microbiology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1973 | 333 Things were changing at Vanderbilt then—even an outsider from the other side of the earth could sense that. I have no doubt that in almost every aspect this university and medical school have gone on changing like the rest of America, like the rest of the world. I am going to talk about change, but at the level of medical science only —I shall say nothing about campus politics or national attitudes on social and racial affairs. For the time being I am interested only in changes in the approach to the biological sciences on which modern medicine has been founded. I want to discuss it primarily by taking some of Goodpasture's contributions—those seminal contributions which opened up at least four major fields of research—and following very briefly and rather superficially how they have been developed since. One of my own main fields of study, the growth of viruses in the chick embryo, stems directly from Goodpasture's work, and I shall probably give this topic pride of place. I shall end by speaking a little sadly about how medical research has changed since the twenties and thirties, when Goodpasture did his most important work, or the thirties and forties, which was my scientific generation. I have for many years been vividly conscious of the debt my own work owes to two great Americans, Theobald Smith and Ernest Goodpasture. I never met Theobald Smith, and his ideas had filtered through the writings of others long before I read his famous exposition of the ecological approach in medicine. I think you will find that almost everything I have written about the biology of disease has been influenced by Theobald Smith's approach. Goodpasture's influence was more direct and specifically influenced two areas of my own experimental work. I have already mentioned the chick embryo for virus cultivation; the second was the pathogenesis of infection by herpes simplex virus. The Seminal Contributions The first paper I shall mention was an investigation of the bacteriology of pandemic influenza carried out at the Chelsea Naval Hospital in Massachusetts in 1918-1919...

Sociology and Literary Studies II. Romance and Reality in Maggie

We all well know that American Studies offers a particularly fascinating and complex example of the difficulties and challenges involved in an interdisciplinary and area studies approach. There may, indeed, be an element of chance in the fact that this touches so sharply on the links that can be established between literature and other studies (literature and sociology, literature and history): the chance that literature was somehow in there from the beginning, in the early days of the subject, and has still held its place in the area-studies map. So, when Henry Nash Smith asked us once if American Studies could develop a method, he looked for his answer in the intervening ground between literary criticism and sociology; and though he found it hard to arrive at his desired method, he suggested that it would lie in some form of cultural anthropology. The divisions between the various disciplines–above all, the varying roles they allowed to consciousness in their interpretation of society and culture–seemed to him to pose profound problems. So, he said, a new method would have to come piecemeal, through a kind of principled opportunism; but he did assume that we could want to turn to works of literature, and the complex interactions between a writer and his environment that constitute a whole literary career, as an important centre of the study, a significant expression of the culture. The problems in fact are large, since in liberal-democratic society literature performs some of the most complex contours of art that have ever existed. But that very fact is part of the interest of the problem and, while Professor Smith's approach raises certain difficulties, on some of which the first part of the present argument turns, I am happy to take the issue raised–that literature can be seen as a social manifestation, that as a creative manifestation it does uniquely reveal central aspects of a culture–as a very important one.

Anesthesia for Infants and Children

The first edition of Dr. Smith's book in 1959 provided a long-needed service in bringing together ideas and practices in pediatric anesthesia. For 14 years he had been carefully evolving a discipline for the management of his many anesthesia problems at Boston Children's Hospital. In 1959 Dr. Smith's conservative approach to many of his problems might have been acceptable, since he represented an authoritative group. It is disappointing that in 1963, in the second edition of his book, he has changed little. What seemed conservative in 1959 might be construed as old-fashioned in 1964. For example, there is little enthusiasm for advanced monitoring, very little information on hypothermia in encephalitis and head injuries. He continues to advocate the use of ether for neurosurgical operations and has a timid approach to controlled respirations—especially in neonatal operations. The many illustrations of open-drop techniques and the antiquated suggestions for anesthesia for pyloric stenosis

Adam Smith's Approach to the Theory of Value

Adam Smith's Approach to the Theory of Value

The Artist of the Egyptian Old Kingdom

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Artist of the Egyptian Old KingdomJohn A. WilsonJohn A. Wilson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 6, Number 4Oct., 1947 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/370844 Views: 43Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Martin Odler, Veronika Dulíková Social context of the Old Kingdom copper model tools, World Archaeology 47, no.11 (Jan 2015): 94–116.https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2014.991805 References, (Mar 2011): 260–275.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393743.refsI. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, E. Sollberger The Cambridge Ancient History, 38 (Mar 2008).https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521082303William C. Hayes EGYPT: INTERNAL AFFAIRS FROM TUTHMOSIS I TO THE DEATH OF AMENOPHIS III, (May 1973): 313–416.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521082303.012