Smith's Economics Research Articles

Affective Profit

Affective Profit

Utopian Trade: A Minimal Defense of Intellectual Exchange

Utopian Trade:A Minimal Defense of Intellectual Exchange Christopher Breu (bio) Trade, in general, gets a bad rap. It is too often the stuff of arcane, if not sleazy, economic policy. It brings to mind meetings like the G-7 or G-20 with ugly, whitish men and a few women in expensive suits making decisions that further immiserate the planet, enrich billionaires, and consign what Jason Moore describes as the world-ecology to further and swifter destruction (2015, 3). One's sympathies rightly lie with the protesters outside rather than the functionaries within. Similarly, even when imagined within a more positive framework, trade seems too wonky a concept. Much better is exchange, production, or the creation of the commons. These have clear Marxist resonances and carry a conception of world-building within them. Focusing on trade too often seems to confirm Bruno Latour's description of economics as thoroughly modernist in its importation of values in the name of facts. When one's horizon is capitalist, trade and economics seem indeed to be necessarily modernist in the specific sense Latour means, not modernist as a collectivizing impulse to imagine other worlds, but modernist in the scientific sense of organized by value free calculations. Such calculations are full of violence, inequality, and moralized amorality (Latour 2004, 133-6). Yet, as Kojin Karatani reminds us, trade has more capacious meanings than its resonances within capitalism (2014). Indeed, trade long preceded capitalism and we can assume it will persist beyond it as well. In Karatani's account of modes of exchange, trade becomes the engine for world building itself. While, I am not thoroughly persuaded by his account that the mode of exchange is dominant in capitalism (mode of production, and its subcategories such as entrepreneurial, corporate, and multinational capitalism, still seems like a necessary category here), it can function as a powerful way of reconceptualizing the possibilities of exchange, including intellectual exchange, in other political-economic formations, formations that themselves are present in subordinate ways within capitalism itself. While problematic [End Page 379] in its complicated renovation of Adam Smith's economics to theorize contemporary China, Giovanni Arrighi's account of dynamics of trade and regimes of accumulation also emphasizes the way in which trade is not necessarily tied to capitalism (Arrighi 2007). Without jettisoning the Marxist account of capitalism, then, I think Arrighi and especially Karatani give us a powerful impetus to reimagine trade as containing a utopian dimension. Such a project seems particularly necessary in our moment of the rise of rightist nationalisms, the explicit return of biological racism, and the ever greater atomization of social life into microidentities and microcommunities. The challenges of the current moment, with climate change accelerating faster than predicted and with global inequality and displacement taking place on ever greater scales, cannot be addressed on the level of the micro-group or even at the level of the group, "race," or nation. A planetary imaginary is necessary. Such an imaginary will of necessity involve forms of cultural cross-identification, sharing, and indeed, exchange. It will also involve attention to dynamics of power, inequality, and differential access to representation as well as other more insistently material resources. It will have to be attentive to what Marcarena Gómez-Barras describes as forms of "extractive capitalism," intellectual as well as material, accumulation by dispossession, and exploitation (indeed its vision and praxis should be opposed to each of these forms of violence), but it shouldn't use the critique of such forms of exploitation and appropriation to decry exchange, sharing, or cross-identification (Gómez-Barris 2017, 3). Nor should it use such a critique to shore up contemporary property relationships. Yet much recent discourse, both theoretical and popular, in contemporary culture has affirmed boundaries, whether group-based or national, and vilified the dynamics of exchange. Some of this shift took place because of the overly celebratory theorizations of hybridity, syncretism, diaspora, and other discourses that accompanied the affirmative account of globalization in the 1990s. As Arif Dirlik and Andrew Culp, among others, have pointed out, the very language of hybridity, border crossing, syncretism, and flows that was central to much globalization and cultural studies discourse in...

Deriving 'General Principles' in Adam Smith: The Ubiquity of Equilibrium and Comparative Statics Analysis Throughout His Works

This paper contributes to the debate over the unity in Smith's corpus by emphasizing Smith's pervasive methodological approach based on an assumption of self-interest. Specifically, Smith consistently relies on equilibrium arguments to explain why a given pattern of economic, political, or social interaction is stable; and comparative static arguments to explain how a stable pattern changes. Some scholars have noted this technique in Smith's economics; however, missing in the literature is an appreciation for Smith’s usage of equilibrium and comparative statics arguments virtually every topic that he studies. As we demonstrate, this includes his explanation of morality and benevolence; the theory of languages; the political economics of development; and his theories of law, politics, and government, such as the form of government, property rights, family structure, and virtue in his famous “four stages” theory of history. We close the paper by arguing that equilibrium and comparative statics analysis has significant implications for the contents of Smith's so-called “missing second book” on government, law, and jurisprudence.

The Cambridge companion to Adam Smith

List of contributors Method of citation Introduction: the coherence of Smith's thought Knud Haakonssen 1. Imagination: morals, science and arts Charles L. Griswold Jr 2. Adam Smith, Belletrist Mark Salber Phillips 3. Adam Smith's theory of language Marcelo Dascal 4. Smith and science Christopher J. Berry 5. Smith on ingenuity, pleasure and the imitative arts Neil De Marchi 6. Sympathy and the impartial spectator Alexander Broadie 7. Virtues, utility and rules Robert Shaver 8. Adam Smith on justice, rights and law David Lieberman 9. Self-interest and other interests Pratap Bhanu Mehta 10. Adam Smith and history J. G .A. Pocock 11. Adam Smith's politics Douglas Long 12. Adam Smith's economics Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen 13. The legacy of Adam Smith Knud Haakonssen and Donald Winch Bibliography Index.

Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland by Gordon Bigelow (review)

Reviews Bigelow, Gordon. Fiction, Famine, andthe Rise of Economics in Vidorian Britain andlrehnd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 229, $65.00. In Fidion, Famine, andthe Rise of Economics in Vidorian Britain andlrehnd, Gordon Bigelow offers a very idiosyncratic look at what he takes to be exemplary moments in the rise of economics — or rather, the general shift in England away from "poHtical economy" towards "economics" — during the Victorian era. The book offers this historical précis in two distinct parts: the first is a theoreticaUy informed discussion of economics as a theory of signification that, in large measure, emerges out of Adam Smith's interest in CondiUac's theories of signification. Whüe this is an interesting and counter-intuitive reading of capitaHsm, one can already sense the presence of an unconvincing equation in the first chapters of the work: "economics" and "capitaHsm" are going to become more or less interchangeable terms for Bigelow, and whüe this may seem fitting enough in his discussion of Dickens and GaskeU in part two of the book, it is clearly going to be inadequate in his discussion of the Irish famine. "CapitaHsm" might have been the grandiose term under which the system of agricultural labour and exchange was supposed to function in Ireland, but this network lacked a number of important constituent elements of capitaHsm: namely, capital, in the sense of income reinvested back into the always struggling venture of the estate. I wiU offer more on this later, but for now I want to suggest what I take to be the strengths and weaknesses of the first part of the text. In the early and more theoretical chapters of the book Bigelow offers a very strong reading of how new linguistic discoveries in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were making the hegemony of European nations seem very precarious. These discoveries revolved around Egyptian and Chinese texts, and the popular view that these languages offered "clues to a perfect form of writing" (14). Feeling some anxiety about this impHcit derogation in the status of European culture, writers like Adam Smith developed an economic doctrine-indeed, an entire world history- "that would prove financial capitaHsm to be the key to European superiority" (18). The argument is, of course, an interesting one, although the relationship between cause and effect seems unconvincing at times. For example, Bigelow offers the foUowing connection between CondiUac's linguistics and Smith economics: "For CondiUac and Smith an increasing level of Victorian Review (2004)1 13 Reviews abstraction in language yields an increased capacity for complex thought" (39). Not only is the connection vague, but it is not at aU certain that what Condillac is saying about the individual's abüity to cognize more complex psychological and linguistic material is reaUy aU that pertinent to Smith's view that society is willing to abide more complex and abstracted relationships around capital and the commodity. What both have in common is, of course, the increasing complexity of things, but other than this very unconvincing connection it is difficult to determine what Bigelow is actuaUy arguing here. Bigelow's view is, I suppose, that capitaHsm arrives on the European stage at a historical moment when society is willing and able to cognize more complex social relations, but whether this is a credible abstraction from CondiUac's theory is certainly difficult to demonstrate. For Bigelow, the discourses of linguistic interiority and economic capitaHsm merge to form the figure of the consumer; this figure comes to dominate not only Victorian economics, but Bigelow's engaged and critical appraisal of it. Despite some difficulties with the early part of the work, it is easy to see that the discussion of the history and phüosophical intertexts of capitaHsm is where Bigelow's chief interest Hes, and I wonder why this book is not simply a treatise on capitaHsm's deep structural simüarities to linguistic systems, or a treatment of capitaHsm as a phüosophical and world-historical idea that coheres around the nature of psychological and social complexity and the attendant necessity of inteUectual and moral abstraction. The insights in these chapters are sometimes difficult to demonstrate or to foUow, but they are original...

Adam Smith and the Political Economy of American Independance

It is generally recognized that Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations in favor of independence for the American colonies. The explicit grounds on which Smith based this argument have not been held to close scrutiny, however. In recent years, Donald Winch has attempted to right the balance between studies of Smith's economics and his politics. Which raised the following questions : Did Smith favor independence of the American colonies on political or economic grounds ? Since Smith was not always explicit in this regard, what particular grounds can be inferred from what is generally known about Smith's politics and/or his economics ? This paper analyzes and explains the grounds for Smith's argument in favor or American independence. It adopts a holistic approach that seeks to integrate Smith's political and economic thought, and utilizes a benefit-cost framework to explicate Smith's final position on the question of American independence.

Economic Thought - Adam Smith's Economics: Its Place in the Development of Economic Thought. By Maurice Brown. New York: Croom Helm, 1988. Pp. vii, 189. $55.00.

Economic Thought - Adam Smith's Economics: Its Place in the Development of Economic Thought. By Maurice Brown. New York: Croom Helm, 1988. Pp. vii, 189. $55.00.

Adam Smith's Economics: Its Place in the Development of Economic Thought, Maurice Brown. London: Croom Helm, 1988, vii + 189 pages.

Adam Smith's Economics: Its Place in the Development of Economic Thought, Maurice Brown. London: Croom Helm, 1988, vii + 189 pages.

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...

Adam Smith's Economics of Politics

E. G. West is Professor of Economics at Carleton University, Ottawa, and now Visiting Professor of Economics at The Center for Study of Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The Comparable Interests of the Old Moral Philosophy and the Modern Social Sciences

I W HEN it is said so often that the social sciences had their origin in philosophy it is surprising to find that no historian of any one of them has yet analyzed the particular kind of philosophy from which they came, namely, moral philosophy. Whatever the reasons for the neglect, these questions are fair: How can a political scientist interpret Grotius correctly if he extracts from Grotius' work only those chapters which deal with government and international law specifically? How much of Adam Smith's economics do we know if we neglect the background of The Wealth of Nations? Why in a definitive way should Adam Ferguson be called a sociologist when he can with equal right be called psychologist, political scientist, economist, jurist, anthropologist, and teacher of ethics and aesthetics as well? These men were moral philosophers, with interests as wide as the customs and institutions of man. To be a moral philosopher was to be an analyst and interpreter of the current mores, and at the same time a protagonist of new relationships thought by the philosopher to be more highly ethical and advantageous. Not only do we put a false light on the moral philosopher when we claim him in one of the social sciences as if he had no other affiliations, but we also fail to see the separate social sciences themselves in true historical perspective when we forget that they once had a very definite pattern of belonging together and of inhering as one mass in a common set of presuppositions. Twentieth century social scientists, and even twentieth century philosophers it is suspected, are in the habit of too completely equating moral philosophy with ethics. It is true that the ultimate aim of that discipline was to bring about human relationships which would be in advance, ethically, of current practice. In the course of argument, however, the moralists' material included discussions of human nature, social forces, progress, marriage and family relationships, economic processes, maintenance of government, international relations, elementary jurisprudence, primitive customs, history of institutions, religion, ethics, aesthetics -all topics of import in the social sciences of our day. This comprehensive table of contents has been consistently characteristic of moral philosophy since the days when the discussions of Socrates were transcribed. Within such a mass of material there was a definite pattern of arrangement of the different sections. Usually in the beginning the moralist would take the reader into his confidence somewhat by setting forth his aims, his starting points and his methods. Here occur those definitions of science and scientific procedure which still rise up to confront an investigator and which should be intensely interesting to students of methodology and to historians of ideas. After setting out in view his working tools the writer would next lay what he considered his foundation stone, his discussion of the facts of human nature. This discussion was the requirement of most importance, to his