Smith's Concept Research Articles

Smith's View on Human Nature: A Problem in the Interpretation ofThe Wealth of Nationsandthe Theory of Moral Sentiments

IIn An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WAO, Adam Smith recommended a free enterprise system based on the argument that free interactions among self-seeking individuals may lead to opulence. Here, Smith's individual is seemingly driven by material incentives. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), however, Smith suggested the possibility that the manner of moral judgment, viz,, sympathy, may reduce individual differences among people in society. Here, individuals seem to be capable of regulating behavior based on their ability to sympathize with fellow human beings. That WN and TMS flowed from the same pen may be regarded as enigmatic. Indeed, in the nineteenth century the Germans christened the enigma, Das Adam Smith Problem. This much celebrated Problem is based on the interpretation that human nature assumed in WN is selfish, while that assumed in TMS is sympathetic. Human sympathy, in turn, is interpreted as man's phylogenetic disposition to be benevolent or altruistic. Given this interpretation, Smith's conception of human nature seems to be problematic.

Nursing Models and Community as Client

Each of the four nursing frameworks discussed here represents worldviews that result in different meanings of the concepts of health, community, and, therefore, of community health. Orem's framework reflects a casual model of the community as an aggregate of individuals and a concept of health that is most akin to Smith's clinical and functional levels of health. Roy's model broadens to allow for consideration of the community as a system. The community as a system is perceived from the perspective of behaviors in response to stimuli. Causality is time ordered and linear, although one must consider the context of continuing time through the mechanism of feedback loops. Smith's adaptive level of health is most congruent with this perspective. King's conceptual framework views the community as a system interacting with the personal and interpersonal systems it includes. Causality is necessarily symmetrical within a systems approach. Health includes both role performance and adaptive levels of health. Finally, Rogers' model considers the community as a field in itself. That field is one of awareness, is integral with the environmental field, and is acausal in nature. Health as expanding awareness is most similar to Smith's eudaimonistic concept of health. It is proposed that these four frameworks reflect increasingly integrated conceptions of community health by which to guide public health/community health nursing practice.

Adam Smith's concept of the social system

This essay will postulate that Adam Smith's view of society was formulated out of historical influences far broader than generally conceded by many commentators in economic thought. Smith's basic behavioral concepts of sympathy and self-interest are significant contributions to economic thought as are his philosophy of human nature being based on liberty and freedom and not simply the creation of wealth. The vectors of influence that converged on Adam Smith were of varied and even contradictory natures. Yet the result of this collision of philosophical forces was clearly an event of significance in the history of philosophical and economic thought.

Learning and mixed-strategy equilibria in evolutionary games

This paper considers whether Maynard Smith's concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy, or “ESS”, can be used to predict long-run strategy frequencies in large populations whose members are randomly paired to play a game, and who adjust their strategies over time according to sensible learning rules. The existing results linking the ESS to stable equilibrium population strategy frequencies when strategies are inherited do not apply to learning, even when each individual always adjusts its strategy in the direction of increased fitness, because the inherited-strategies stability results depend on aggregating across individuals, and this is not possible for learning. The stability of learning must therefore be analyzed for the entire system of individuals' strategy adjustments. The interactions between individuals' adjustments prove to be generically destabilizing at mixed-strategy equilibria, which are saddlepoints of the learning dynamics. Using the inherited-strategies dynamics to describe learning implicitly restricts the system to the stable manifold whose trajectories approach the saddlepoint, masking its instability. Thus, allowing for the interactions between individuals' strategy adjustments extends the widely recognized instability of mixed-strategy equilibria in multi-species inherited-strategies models to single-species (or multi-species) learning models.

Evolutionarily stable strategies for a finite population and a variable contest size

This paper presents a generalization of Maynard Smith's concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) to cover the cases of a finite population and a variable contest size. Both equilibrium and stability conditions are analysed. The standard Maynard Smith ESS with an infinite population and a contest size of two (pairwise contests) is shown to be a special case of this generalized ESS. An important implication of the generalized ESS is that in finite populations the behaviour of an ESS player is "spiteful", in the sense that an ESS player acts not only to increase his payoff but also to decrease the payoffs of his competitors. The degree of this "spiteful" behaviour is shown to increase with a decrease in the population size, and so is most likely to be observed in small populations. The paper concludes with an extended example: a symmetric two-pure-strategies two-player game for a finite population. It is shown that a mixed strategy ESS is globally stable against invasion by any one type of mutant strategist. The condition for the start of simultaneous invasion by two types of mutant is also given.

Note on Commitment and Community among Volunteer Firefighters

Three hundred seventy‐two volunteer firefighters from fifteen all‐volunteer departments in a five county area in central Virginia were administered a questionnaire which examined commitment and other attitudinal and demographic variables. The correlation coefficient between number of years a volunteer firefighter and age was. 77. Seventy‐five percent (273) of firefighters had seldom or never considered quitting their role. Seventy‐five percent indicated that over half of their close friends were fellow volunteer firefighters. Sixty‐seven percent responded that being a member of the fire department was of equal or greater importance than church membership. Theoretically it is plausible that the primary group rewards experienced by firefighters as members of communal organizations accounted for the high level of commitment. An empirical example of Smith's (1981) concept of pure volunteers is provided.

Le problème Adam Smith

En 1776, Adam Smith publiait An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, deux gros volumes de plus de 500 pages chacun, pour montrer que ni la quantité de monnaie d'or et d'argent, ni les ressources de son sol ne font la richesse d'une nation, mais son travail ; et que la cause de cette richesse ne doit pas être recherchée dans une balance du commerce favorable, pas plus dans le seul progrès de l'agriculture, mais dans la division du travail. En conséquence, il s'écartait d'une tradition qui remontait à Aristote — et que tous, alors, reprenaient à leur compte — selon laquelle la valeur des biens échangés est fonction de leur utilité, et en instaurait une autre — que les marxistes poursuivent encore — qui fonde la valeur sur le travail.

Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759) explores role of sympathy in a world where people face each other as spectators and spectacles.' Much attention has been focused on Adam Smith's concept of impartial spectator, hypothetical figure who is supposed to govern our actions granting or withholding fellow-feeling.2 Scholars have discussed how Smith developed this concept from assumptions about social and moral behavior implicit in works of Hutcheson and Hume, and debate has often centered on identifying, as it were, this impartial spectator.3 He (and he is clearly masculine) is alternatively characterized as an ideal observer, an ordinary innocent bystander, voice of people, an omniscient deity, normative values of society, a relativistic social code, absolute standards, personification of conscience, internalization of social repression, superego, and simply a hypothetical, abstract third person. T. D. Campbell argues in Adam Smith's Science of Morals that impartial spectator represents the average, or normal or ordinary man, and he provides an array of citations to show that Smith speaks interchangeably of the 'spectator', 'spectators', 'bystander', 'a third person', 'every attentive spectator', 'every impartial bystander', 'every impartial spectator', 'every indifferent person', 'another man', 'other men', 'society', and most frequently of all, 'mankind.' For Campbell, impartial spectator is by definition, someone who is not acting.4 Yet D. D. Raphael, in an article that traces development of Smith's concept through early lectures, drafts, and revisions, shows how Smith refined his characterization of impartial spectator from a general notion of

An evolutionarily stable strategy approach to indiscriminate spite

AN individual behaves spitefully when it harms itself in order to harm another individual more(1). Hamilton(1,2) predicted that spite may evolve if it is expressed only in those encounters that occur between individuals of less than average relatedness. More recently Verner(3) suggested that territory size may become super-optimal because of a selective advantage arising from the spiteful exclusion of others from limited resources. His model is essentially different from Hamilton's in that spite is directed at individuals indiscriminately with respect to relatedness. Recently Rothstein(4) has shown analytically that the initial spread of spiteful traits will be very slow in all but the smallest populations. He also argued verbally that indiscriminate spite can never be evolutionarily stable even if it should spread (see also Davies(5)). The question of evolutionary stability is clearly important, but its resolution requires an analytical approach. We report here an approach based on Maynard Smith's(6) concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), a strategy which, when common, does better than any alternative strategy played by a rare mutant. We show that spite can be an ESS, but that the magnitude of spite will be small in large populations.

Adam Smith's conception of human nature

(1976). Adam Smith's conception of human nature. Forum for Social Economics: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 8-17.

Adam Smith's Conception of Self-Interest in Economic and Political Affairs

Adam Smith's Conception of Self-Interest in Economic and Political Affairs

Sympathy and propriety in Adam smith's rhetoric

Adam Smith's moral sentimentalist concepts of “sympathy” and “propriety” provide the basis for his rhetorical principles: “perspicuity,” “description,” and the rhetorical critic as the “social self.” The latter ensure that aesthetically appropriate communication consists of the same elements as sympathetic communication—the presentation of character, emotion, and circumstance. Aesthetic propriety also eliminates the possibility of deceitful or unskilled communication resulting in incorrect moral judgment.

Adam Smith's Concept of Labor

Adam Smith's Concept of Labor

A Comparison of Two Approaches to the Construction of Models for Quantal Responses to Mixtures of Drugs

The authors amplify certain aspects of their past work on the construction of models for quantal responses to mixtures of drugs, introduce some new material, and compare their approach with that adopted by Ashford and Smith. The authors point out that their attitude towards classification of joint drug actions has changed since 1952, although they disagree with Ashford and Smith's suggestion that the authors' classification of 1952 is subject to anomalies. The authors' later work has emphasized a general method for development of mathematical models to correspond with specific biological situations, and questions of classification of biological or mathematical models appear to them less important than formerly. Perhaps the most important difference between the two approaches lies in the concept of dose as a variable. The authors have used the word 'dose' in its usual sense, to mean a quantity of drug measured in ordinary scientific units, whereas Ashford and Smith use it to mean any monotonic transformation of the dose as ordinarily conceived. This drastic generalization of the dose variable inevitably leads to mathematical models that are in general almost devoid of predictive properties. However, such generalization seems to be unnecessary for most pharmacological and toxicological situations. Concerning more specialized terms, it is stressed that Ashford and Smith use several of the same terms as the authors do, but with different meanings. The significance of Ashford and Smith's concepts is discussed.

TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF AN UNFORTUNATE LEGACY

SUMMARY The paper starts from Schumpeter's interpretation of Adam Smith's concept of the contemporary embryonic industrialist whose main function was considered to be the accumulation of capital. The author traces the development of this concept in the nineteenth century and tries to explain its origin. He shows that medieval reality, i.e. the relationship between stans and transactor in the societas maris is at the root of Smith's concept. It remained justifiable as late as 1776 on the basis of the cooperation of capitalist and entrepreneur-manager in the early mechanized cotton industry, as it is presented in Robert Owen's autobiography. But just this self-testimony shows also the rapid change of this relationship after the appearance of the Wealth of Nations, which neither the classical economists nor Marx under-stood in their implications. From this came an unfortunate economic legacy, the misunderstanding of certain aspects of entrepreneurship, which only Schumpeter discarded on principle in his Theory of EconomicDevelopment.

The Entrepreneur in Economic Theory

At the beginning of our science stands the great discovery of un? planned regularity in the affairs of the market. This was Adam Smith's conception of the invisible hand which pushes every man in every one of his actions?pursued only in the furtherance of personal affairs, ?and known only to his Maker and to himself?into the proper place in the grand scheme. Perception of this unplanned regularity in the affairs of men was not altogether lacking among the ancients, nor among the medieval moralists. The Romans conceived a natural law quod per aeque apud omnes gentes custoditur, and they contrasted this regularity with the planned regularity of the civil law. The jus gentium was another recog? nition of such an unplanned regularity as it was placed in juxtaposition to the moral law. In fact, it may be said that from its beginnings juris? prudence is the great attempt to discover the relationships between the unplanned social regularities and the moral law. However, neither the ancients nor the medieval moralists concerned themselves directly with the unplanned order of the economic sphere, although they sometimes did so indirectly. They were preoccupied with another problem, viz. with the fact of deviation from regularity, or the fact that the individual buyer or seller can do many different things. They did not ask the question, how can there be order if each man can pursue seemingly unco-ordinated aims ? To ask this question, and thus to found a new science, is the merit of the 18th century. I have likened unplanned economic order to the jus gentium mainly to indicate as forcefully as I can that in economics as in international law the great problem remains: what are the relations between the un? planned regularities and the moral law? In economics we must know: how can there possibly be an economic policy, if there is economic law? What is the relation between economics and morality ? I propose to show that the answer to these questions has been in the making by those who have studied the concept of the entrepreneur, after they received from the classics the conception of the unplanned economic order.