Smith's Theory Research Articles

Smith theory and irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds

We study the cohomological properties of the fixed locus $X^G$ of an automorphism group $G$ of prime order $p$ acting on a variety $X$ whose integral cohomology is torsion-free. We obtain an precise relation between the mod $p$ cohomology of $X^G$ and natural invariants for the action of $G$ on the integral cohomology of $X$. We apply these results to irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds of deformation type of the Hilbert scheme of two points on a K3 surface: the main result of this paper is a formula relating the dimension of the mod $p$ cohomology of $X^G$ with the rank and the discriminant of the invariant lattice in the second cohomology space with integer coefficients of $X$.

Time to build and out-of-equilibrium growth process

This paper proposes an analytical approach to growth modelling that focuses on the temporal and hence the organizational dimension of real production processes, rather than making use of a production function, which is a pure technical relationship. This approach takes advantage of the breakthroughs in economic theory by Georgescu-Roegen and Hicks. The step-by-step analysis of production in time proposed by Georgescu-Roegen has brought into light the idleness of capital equipment and of human resources as the main obstacle to growth, and given a robust basis to Smith's growth theory according to which the articulation between the division of labor and the extent of market is the main engine of growth. The analysis of the time dimension of production processes proposed by Hicks that focuses on the distinction between construction and utilization phases has opened the way for a comprehensive analysis of the type of disturbances – unemployment and productivity slowdown – which arise along an out-of-equilibrium growth path. These contributions provide the basis for the analysis of qualitative change as a learning process, whose evolution is not predetermined but depends on what happens along the way, that is, on the recurrent distortions in the structure of productive capacity due to co-ordination failures.

Adam Smith's theory of absolute advantage and the use of doxography in the history of economics

This article reconstructs Adam Smith's theory of international trade and compares it with the way it is presented in modern textbooks as the theory of absolute advantage. This textbook presentation falls short of Smith's original ideas. I argue that the reason for this is the doxographic reconstruction of Smith's theory to fit him into a Whig history of international trade theory. In this way the historiography of international trade theory has falsely established Smith as a forerunner of modern neoclassical trade theory. I conclude by discussing to what extent Smith's insights can still be relevant today and what can be learnt from the mistreatment Smith has suffered in the historiography of international trade theory.

Reinhold Niebuhr's Quest for Balance in the Public Oversight of Market Economies

Three basic themes played indispensable roles in Reinhold Niebuhr’s engagements with economic issues: (1) the foundational importance of a theological anthropology for his critical assessment of complex social, economic, and political issues; (2) his focus on two clashing theories of economic order: Adam’s Smith’s doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism and Karl Marx’s revolutionary vision for the collective ownership of property within a centralized state system; and (3) his endorsement of a realistic yet viable alternative to these two classic theories, one that involved pragmatic and incremental steps toward fostering economic justice through the public regulation and oversight of a free-market economy. These pragmatic measures included allocating government resources for vitally important public goods and services at federal, state, and local levels. Though Niebuhr was initially drawn to some form of democratic socialism, he embraced this incremental strategy within the context of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s implementation of his New Deal agenda. My analysis of Niebuhr’s contributions concludes with attention to new challenges confronting contemporary quests for economic justice in a post–New Deal era, one marked Soundings, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania state University, University Park, Pa di sc us sio n diussion

ADAM SMITH AND THE MODERN SCIENCE OF ETHICS

Third-party decision-makers, orspectators, have emerged as a useful empirical tool in modern social science research on moral motivation. Spectators of a sort also serve a central role in Adam Smith's moral theory. This paper compares these two types of spectatorship with respect to their goals, methodologies, visions of human nature and emphasis on moral rules. I find important similarities and differences and conclude that this comparison suggests significant opportunities for philosophical ethics to inform empirical and theoretical research on moral preferences and vice versa.

Americanism and financial accounting theory – Part 3: Adam Smith, the rise and fall of socialism, and Irving Fisher's theory of accounting

A previous paper (Part 1) rejected the conventional wisdom that America was ‘born capitalist’ and the historians’ consensus that it had become capitalist by the early-19th century; another (Part 2) rejected Chandler's thesis that the ‘modern business enterprise’ brought a ‘new form of capitalism’ to America from the 1840s. The accounting evidence suggests that America began to make the transition to capitalism around 1900 in a period of intense conflict between ‘capital and labour’ generated by ‘big business’ from the 1880s, a process not completed until the 1920s. This paper (Part 3) examines the consequences for America's political ideology and financial accounting theory. America's exceptional transition, it argues, explains the history of its political ideology, and this history explains Irving Fisher's theory of accounting. Section A argues that America lagged behind Britain because it started from a society of simple commodity producers and semi-capitalists, which created an exceptional ideological problem for its ruling elite. Big business generated hostility from workers, farmers and small employers – expressed in labour movements, ‘populism’, socialism, and ‘progressivism’ – and created an ideological problem by contradicting the ‘independent producer’ ideology of workers and farmers, and the ‘individual liberalism’ of small manufacturers and merchants, both underwritten by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The paper argues that Smith's theory of price articulates as semi-capitalist accounting, which explains his popularity in America until the appearance of big business in the 1880s. Socialism and progressivism became political forces in America from 1900 to around 1920. Progressivism produced ‘corporate liberalism’, the ideological counter to socialism that corporations could be made ‘socially responsible’ by government regulation and ‘publicity’ to ensure they earned only ‘fair’ returns, but this left two problems. First, socialists argued that no profit was ‘fair’, and second, fear of the ‘labour danger’ made American financial reports secretive and conservative. Section B argues that Irving Fisher responded to these problems with a theory of accounting, which he developed as a refutation of Marx and the American brand of socialism advocated by Eugene Debs, the threateningly successful presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. An important but neglected reason for socialism's abrupt collapse around 1920, it argues, was that the socialists lost the intellectual argument with the middle classes, and that Fisher's theory played an important role in this defeat. Fisher was a vigorous self-publicist, strongly influenced the teaching of economics and accounting in the universities and, the paper argues, changed the language of American accounting. Fisher claimed that accounting practice supported his theory of ‘capital’ and ‘income’, but the paper shows he did not understand double-entry bookkeeping or the accountants’ ‘cost theory of value’, and therefore divorced accounting from the reality of business transactions. As his theory underlies the FASB's framework, the paper concludes that Fisher's legacy to the world is a pathological theory of financial accounting.

Preston Smith's theory of the effect of heat radiation on sound propagation in gases

The 1996 Trent-Crede Medal encomium by Barger states that Smith's favorite paper was "Effect of heat radiation on sound propagation in gases" (JASA, 1957). Smith stated this also in a private communication some time earlier to the present writer. The paper was prompted by works by Stokes and Rayleigh in which heat effects were modeled by Newton's law of cooling, which presumes that the heat radiation out from a limited region of heated matter is proportional to the difference of the local temperature and that of the surrounding medium. Stokes in 1851 constructed a theory for how this assumption leads to a prediction of the dependence of phase velocity and attenuation on frequency, and this theory was used by Rayleigh in the Theory of Sound to analyze whether acoustical fluctuations were more nearly isothermal or adiabatic. However, as Smith pointed out, apparently for the first time, neither Stokes and Rayleigh fully understood the relevant physics. When the atomic nature of heat radiation within gases is taken into account, the effect of heat radiation (in contrast to the effect of thermal conduction) is negligible at all frequencies. For all frequencies for which the attenuation is small, the acoustic fluctuations are adiabatic.

Adam Smith's Theory of Money and Banking

This paper resolves a long-running debate in the economics literature – the debate over Smith’s theory of money and banking – and thereby revolutionizes current understanding about the history and evolution of monetary analysis. Smith did not present either the real-bills theory or a price-specie-flow theory of banknote regulation, as generally presumed, but rather a reflux theory based upon the premise that the demand for money is fixed at a particular nominal quantity. This theory denies that an excess supply of money can ordinarily make it into the domestic nominal income stream or influence prices or employment. The essence of Smith’s theory is not, as the real bills interpretation would suggest, that banknotes are elastic credit instruments that accommodate changes in demand; rather, it is that the supply of money, including banknotes, is forced to regulate itself to a fixed demand. And unlike Hume’s price-specie-flow mechanism, Smith’s specie-flow mechanism does not point to changes in domestic relative to world prices as the factor motivating the trades that restore monetary equilibrium.

Daily spiritual experiences, social support, and depression among elderly Korean immigrants

Objectives: This study examined the associations of daily spiritual experiences (DSE) and social support with depression to find viable coping resources and enhance the quality of life among elderly Korean immigrants. Method: We used Smith's (2003) theory of religious effects and Baron and Kenny's (1986) approach for mediation analysis to explain the mediating role of social support between DSE and depression. The sample consisted of 200 elderly Korean immigrants who were aged 65 or older (mean age = 72.5, range = 65–89) living in the New York City Metropolitan area. Hierarchical regression model was used with SPSS version 17.0 to analyze cross-sectional data. Results: Elderly Korean immigrants in the present sample were found to be moderately engaged in DSE but not experiencing a fair level of social support. Respondents reported no depression on the average but 30% of them (60 out of 200 respondents) were experiencing mild to severe depression. Both DSE and social support were inversely related with depression, and the relationship between DSE and depression was mediated by social support. Conclusion: These findings are only suggestive and should not be generalized to a larger population. However, this study supports the importance of DSE and social support in the life of elderly Korean immigrants as a way to alleviate depression. Mental health professionals may consider facilitating social network when elderly Korean immigrants suffer from depression.

Perceived Access to Reinforcers as a Function of Alcohol Consumption Among One First Nation Group

Spillane and Smith (2007, Psychol Bull 133:395-418) postulated that high levels of problem drinking in some First Nation (FN) communities resulted in part from the perception that there is low access to alternative reinforcers (e.g., jobs, friendships, family relationships, and financial security), that many alternative reinforcers are less contingent on sobriety, and that others are available regardless of drinking status for reserve-dwelling FN members. This study examined perceptions of access to alternative reinforcers and the extent to which access varied as a function of drinking in 211 FN members living on 1 reserve in Canada, 138 middle socioeconomic status Caucasians (MCCs), and 98 low socioeconomic status Caucasians (LCCs). The FN group expected less access to employment, quality family and friend relationships, and financial security compared with the MCC group. After controlling for perceived access in general, gender, and age, the FN group reported that drinking would not cause a decrease in access to employment, family relationships, friendships, and finances as compared to the MCC group. The FN group did not differ from the LCC group in the degree to which they expected drinking to cost access to family relationships or finances, but the LCC group expected drinking to have less of an impact on access to jobs and friendships as compared to the FN group. The results provide initial support for the Spillane and Smith theory of problem drinking among this 1 FN group. The results suggest that increasing access to these reinforcers may reduce problematic drinking in this FN group.

Adam Smith and ordoliberalism: on the political form of market liberty

AbstractIn the context of the contemporary crisis of neoliberal political economy, the politics of austerity has reasserted the liberal utility of the state as the political authority of market freedom. This article argues that economy has no independent existence, and that instead, economy is a political practice. It examines the political economy of Adam Smith and the German ordoliberal tradition to decipher the character of the political in political economy and its transformation from Smith's liberal theory into neoliberal theology. Ordoliberalism emerged in the late 1920s at a time of a manifest crisis of political economy, and its argument was fundamental for the development of the neoliberal conception that free economy is matter of strong state authority. The conclusion argues with Marx that the state is the concentrated force of free economy.

Revisiting Adam Smith's theory of the falling rate of profit

Purpose – This paper aims to present the salient features of Smith's argument of the falling rate of profit. This theory has usually been interpreted as a result of the intensification of competition in the markets of goods and services of the factors of production. This aspect of Adam Smith had been initially posed by Ricardo and subsequently was widely adopted by the major economists of the past as well as from the majority of the modern historians of economic thought.

Adam Smith and the Theory of Punishment

A distinctive theory of punishment plays a central role in Smith's moral and legal theory. According to this theory, we regard the punishment of a crime as deserved only to the extent that an impartial spectator would go along with the actual or supposed resentment of the victim. The first part of this paper argues that Smith's theory deserves serious consideration and relates it to other theories such as utilitarianism and more orthodox forms of retributivism. The second part considers the objection that, because Smith's theory implies that punishment is justified only when there is some person or persons who is the victim of the crime, it cannot explain the many cases where punishment is imposed purely for the public good. It is argued that Smith's theory could be extended to cover such cases. The third part defends Smith's theory against the objection that, because it relies on our natural feelings, it cannot provide an adequate moral justification of punishment.

What Piece of Work is Man? Frans de Waal and Pragmatist Naturalism

Frans de Waal has questioned the liberal notion that humans are primarily defined by selfishness. De Waal claims that primates are gregarious and guided by empathy. Hence, he argues we should return to Adam Smith's focus on empathy. We believe a return to pragmatism would be more appropriate. Pragmatism largely conforms to the view of human nature that De Waal's research now supports and can provide a more sophisticated framework to integrate recent insights about primate sociality into political and legal theory.The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature, and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality, adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the form of calculation of profits, idealistic without being romantic.-John Dewey, 1922 (1983, 13)1. IntroductionAt the core of much present-day, liberal, legal and political theory there is a notion of human nature defined in terms of individualism, rationality and selfinterest.1 This definition is central to most forms of contract theory. People are assumed to be calculating and self-regarding loners, reluctant to join the bonds of social union. An autonomous individual can only be asked to suffer the burdens of community, many legal and political theorists suggest, if certain preconditions are met and individual freedoms are guaranteed.Primatologist Frans de Waal has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of these presuppositions of modem liberal thought and the bleak view of human nature implicit in them. Liberal theory, De Waal believes, would benefit from a better understanding of the gregarious and intensely social nature of human beings. Nature has an undeserved bad name in political and legal theory. What is central in the life of our nearest cousins, the social primates, is not individualism and self interest, but sympathy and empathy. To accommodate this insight, De Waal suggests a return to Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments. Adam Smith intuited the central importance of sympathy and emotion for the development of morality, according to De Waal, and managed to construct a moral theory that is much more in tune with the embryonic morality that can be observed among primates.There is much to be said for this return to Smith. Smith is a highly original thinker who can still suggest new directions for legal and political theory.2 Yet, in this article we will argue that for the reconstruction of legal and political theory that De Waal proposes, pragmatism would be a more suitable framework than Smith's moral sentimentalism. For the project that De Waal wants to pursue, i.e. the reconnection of political and legal theory with their moral roots in primate sociality, there seems to be a great deal more overlap with the classical pragmatists than with Smith. Smith's theory of moral sentiments predates Darwin and eschews many of the central premises of evolutionary theory. In the end, it is a theory primarily inspired on classical virtue ethics, not on a naturalistic recognition of the mammalian origins of our morality. The pragmatists, on the other hand, fully integrated the implications of evolutionary theory into their philosophical thought and drew on the best scholarship of their day to ground their perspective on a scientifically mature understanding of man in nature.3 In an earlier work De Waal argued for the development of a Darwistotelian view; a view which fused the evolutionary insights of Darwin with the virtue ethics of Aristotle - in many ways a precursor of Adam Smith (2001, 81-82). Our suggestion would be to develop not a Darwistotelian, but a Darweyan perspective, which fuses Darwin's insights with the philosophical and moral theories of John Dewey and other pragmatists.There are a number of reasons why an association with philosophical pragmatism would be more fitting than a return to Smith and Aristotle. …

On Three Defenses of Sentimentalism

This essay shows that a moral sense or moral sentiments alone cannot identify appropriate morals. To this end, the essay analyzes three defenses of Francis Hutcheson's, David Hume's, and Adam Smith's moral sense theories against the relativism charge that a moral sense or moral sentiments vary across people, societies, cultures, or times. The first defense is the claim that there is a universal moral sense or universal moral sentiments. However, even if they exist, a moral sense or moral sentiments alone cannot identify appropriate morals. The second defense is to adopt a general viewpoint theory, which identifies moral principles by taking a general viewpoint. But it needs to employ reason, and even if not, it does not guarantee that we identify appropriate morals. The third defense is to adopt an ideal observer theory, which draws moral principles from sentimental reactions of an ideal observer. Yet it still does not show that a moral sense or moral sentiments alone can identify appropriate morals.

Book Reviews

David Colander of Middlebury College reviews “Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element” by John D. Mueller. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Considers a neo-Scholastic view on economics that restores the Scholastic elements of consumption and final distribution to the field after their elimination in Adam Smith's theory of economics. Discusses Smithology and its discontents; scholastic economics, c. 1250-1776; classical economics, 1776-1871; neoclassical economics, 1871-c. 2000; neo-Scholastic economics, c. 2000 and beyond; the “mother's problem” and St. Augustine's solution; the success and failure of neoclassical economics; an empirical test--fatherhood and homicide; the moral implications of scarcity--the good Samaritan paradigm; marriage, the “first natural bond of human society”; why parents give children “existence, rearing, and instruction”; how neo-Scholastic economics explains our life earnings and spending; saving America's infant industry; the theory of American public choice; injustice in exchange--unemployment; injustice in exchange--inflation; and the three worldviews. Mueller is Director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and President of LBMC LLC. Index.”

Beyond the invisible hand: groundwork for a new economics

One of the central tenets of mainstream economics is Adam Smith's proposition that, given certain conditions, self-interested behavior by individuals leads them to the social good, almost as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. This deep insight has, over the past two centuries, been taken out of context, contorted, and used as the cornerstone of free-market orthodoxy. In Beyond the Invisible Hand, Kaushik Basu argues that mainstream economics and its conservative popularizers have misrepresented Smith's insight and hampered our understanding of how economies function, why some economies fail and some succeed, and what the nature and role of state intervention might be. Comparing this view of the invisible hand with the vision described by Kafka--in which individuals pursuing their atomistic interests, devoid of moral compunction, end up creating a world that is mean and miserable--Basu argues for collective action and the need to shift our focus from the efficient society to one that is also fair.Using analytic tools from mainstream economics, the book challenges some of the precepts and propositions of mainstream economics. It maintains that, by ignoring the role of culture and custom, traditional economics promotes the view that the current system is the only viable one, thereby serving the interests of those who do well by this system. Beyond the Invisible Hand challenges readers to fundamentally rethink the assumptions underlying modern economic thought and proves that a more equitable society is both possible and sustainable, and hence worth striving for.By scrutinizing Adam Smith's theory, this impassioned critique of contemporary mainstream economics debunks traditional beliefs regarding best economic practices, self-interest, and the social good.

Existential-humanistic and dynamic systems approaches to child development in mutual encounter.

Dynamic systems theory is one of the most recent perspectives to appear in child development texts. This article critically examines some of the dynamic systems thinking that has emerged in the area of child development from an existential-humanistic developmental point of view. In particular, special attention is given to Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith's dynamic systems theory, because they alone have made an effort to build an organized dynamic systems framework for interpreting child development. Moreover, this theoretical framework has remained exceptionally popular and influential relative to other dynamic systems works. It was found that there are both similarities and differences between existential-humanistic developmental thought and Thelen and Smith's theory. Alan Fogel's dynamic systems views were found to be helpful in overcoming barriers to a fruitful dialogue between existential-humanistic and dynamic systems approaches to child development.

Coarse geometry and P. A. Smith theory

We define a generalization of the fixed point set, called the bounded fixed set, for a group acting by isometries on a metric space. An analogue of the P. A. Smith theorem is proved for metric spaces of finite asymptotic dimension, which relates the coarse homology of the bounded fixed set to the coarse homology of the total space.

Parenthyrsos: On the Medium Which Is Not One

Parenthyrsos:On the Medium Which Is Not One Zachary Sng In the hands of the poet, a robe [Gewand] is not a robe at all, for it hides nothing from the imagination. It is therefore of little import whether Laocoön is depicted clothed or naked in his dying agony, since every part of his body—robed, exposed, or wrapped in serpentine bulk—reveals the same depth of intolerable suffering to the poetic gaze. This is what Lessing's Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) celebrates as the greatest triumph of poetry over the visual arts: a sartorial indifference that one who works with paint or marble can only dream about (Laocoön 38; "Laokoon" 51). Caught between the insuperable materiality of his medium and the demands of his craft, the visual artist makes a series of increasingly desperate sacrifices, giving up convention for expression, and expression for beauty (Laocoön 39; "Laokoon" 51). He is compelled to portray Laocoön unclothed, although this contravenes what one would expect of a high-priest in the midst of a sacrificial ceremony. He even has to forgo any depiction of the death-scream, the most powerful expression of Laocoön's profound agony. Nothing that he offers up, though, can ever win him the same amount of freedom as the poet with his perfectly translucent signs. Unlike the visual arts, poetry inhabits the "limitless field" of the imagination and operates with incorporeal forms which, "though varied and great in number, may exist simultaneously without concealing or damaging each other, as would the objects themselves or their natural symbols in the narrow confines of space or time" (Laocoön 40; "Laokoon" 53). Where sculpture and painting [End Page 1029] labor under the burden of the material, poetry soars through realms loftier and more rarified. In contrast to Hegel, who subsumes medial distinctions among the arts to a narrative about the history of art in general (see Aesthetics), Lessing submits the quarrel between ancients and moderns to a more fundamental question: how are the individual arts determined by their different medial possibilities and limitations? In other words, how do linguistic and visual signs differ in the ways that they interpose themselves between two poles, how do these differences affect their ability to transport from one pole to the other? Despite their disagreements about Laocoön's scream, a concern with mediality turns out to be common ground shared by Lessing and his Scottish contemporary, Adam Smith. To cry out in bodily pain is "unmanly and unbecoming," according to Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and potentially disruptive to sympathy (35). This is because sympathy is dependent on two related forms of the middle that are both put at risk by the body. The first is a necessary moderation: the propriety of passion required for sympathy can be achieved only if the sufferer produces in his pain a "pitch" that is identical with a "certain mediocrity" (32). The problem is that such a mediocrity—an intermediate that is neither too much nor too little1—is "different in different passions," for it is "high in some and low in others" (33). Sympathy is thus aligned with the concept of moderation [mesotēs] formulated in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which defines virtue as "a mean state between two vices, one of excess and one of defect." This mean is, however, "not one and the same for everybody" and must be worked out by each individual in each specific situation (2.6.5, 2.6.15). The second form of the middle that Smithian sympathy relies upon is the medium which enables acts of imaginative identification to be performed. Sympathy only occurs when a certain set of conditions for proper sight are met: the spectators must not only be able to see suffering, but the sufferer must be able to see himself being seen by the spectator.2 Given the complex bi-directional task that sight must perform in the production of sympathy, passions that "take their origin from the body" are far less reliable than passions that originate in the imagination, because the imagination is "more ductile" and makes...