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I neglected to give page cite for the Viner quotation (“I will endeavor…”); it is p. 201.

Deirdre McCloskey’s article, “Adam Smith, Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists,” is a well-reasoned piece that seeks to dispel the notion that Adam Smith was primarily an economist. As she states in the opening sentence (I love writers who get to the point), “Smith was mainly an ethical philosopher.” Her article traces the line of ethicists from Plato to Smith who believed that seven primary virtues (justice, fortitude, prudence, temperance, benevolence, faith, and hope) provide the foundation for all morality. Where Smith based his economics in his philosophy of ethics, McCloskey shows how modern economists have largely forsaken this connection, forgetting the tie that economics (presented in Smith’s Wealth of Nations) must maintain with ethics (presented in his Theory of Moral Sentiments). In fact, the ethical side of Smith, represented by TMS, was largely forgotten until relatively recently.

Ms. McCloskey is well-qualified to write a piece on Adam Smith the philosopher, instead of Adam Smith, the economist. Of course Adam Smith WAS really a philosopher: his job title at University of Glasgow circa 1760 reads “Professor of Moral Philosophy.” McCloskey’s position description is similarly expansive at University of Illinois, Chicago: “Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication.” She is, like Smith, evidently a polymath.

Most economists today approach Adam Smith from one of two angles. Either he was (1) a free-market capitalist, originator of the “Invisible hand” and early opponent of mercantilist voodoo; or (2) a free-market capitalist and author of The Wealth of Nations (WN), who also wrote a book of philosophy (TMS), which is probably brilliant, but contains language and concepts foreign to (and apparently inconsistent with) WN, and thus to be avoided.

McCloskey sees no inconsistency between Smith’s two great published works. She sees no need to jettison the moral reasoning of TMS in order to focus on the economic insight of WN. Indeed, she sees Smith’s ethical philosophy as foundational to his economics, and urges present-day economists to make a similar connection. Smith she sees as primarily an ethicist (like the other former virtue ethicists: namely Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas), whose moral thinking drove his economic thinking. Divorcing the moral aspect of Smith’s thought (as modern-day economists do when they ignore TMS) rends WN, leaving it devoid of its context and true meaning. Similarly, such a divorce rends modern economics from a sure foundation, leaving it amoral, adrift on a sea of maximum utility.

Nate Silver (pollster and renowned baseball statistician) takes issue with the methodology of this survey, do the authors have a response?

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/are-you-smarter-than-george-mason.html

I realize that the strict libertarian would argue against any mandated coverage. Until the US citizenry is willing to let people who fail to provide for themselves die on the hospital’s steps, a coverage mandate for major illness is warranted. I raise significant concerns about any major role for government beyond certain minimal things it can do reasonably well. These concerns are problematic for those favoring a single payer solution. I think such an approach would guarantee coverage, but otherwise it would be a disaster. I’m noticing, for example, that some of the numbers here seem to mirror data about the number of conservatives in each discipline. So if field X is comprised of 10% conservatives, and 10% of HUP’s publications in that field fall right of center, couldn’t they argue that conservatives have the same chance of being published as liberals? Is there any way to see a sample of submissions and or rejections? If one wishes to critique the literature for an ideological bias, however, it is best to get one’s facts straight.OK, but keep it respectful.

Thanks

Robert

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And which econometrician will regard this blatant misrepresentation of the facts as proof that the economics profession has been hijacked by corporate speaking engagement fees and simplistic right wingers who have a criticism for everything, but reverence for only the practice of doing less (so the ‘free market’ can work its magic, don’t you see?) I really hope the state of economics improves to the point where people like Cushman and Mankiw will be held to account for their lies, but remembering Nial Ferguson’s hack journalism in Newsweek reminds me that their are lots more inane fact manipulating liars to go through first. Oh yeah, and Phil Gramm has something to say about the economy in the WSJ. I assume its not that we are still in a “mental recession” as this “nation of whiners” was in 2008? Jeez, the fact these people even get writing gigs anymore makes me want to steal things from 7 eleven.

I found this to be a stimulating and useful article. However I find two major shortcomings. Firstly it could provide more substance to illustrate various religious taboos. Secondly it could examine beyond hard religion and look at social taboos/ tabus as projected by groups less formally spiritually aligned.

I am partial to the perspective shared by Harari in his recent book “Sapiens” (and before that by others) that like most human concepts and beliefs, religions are simply self-serving myths that either evolved or were constructed for various reasons – control and power, security, resilience, etc. Most of the mainstream, monotheistic religions – which the authors focus most closely on – arose out of various distillations of incorporated belief systems. For instance the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Islam and Christianity incorporated various beliefs and myths from other sources, as reflected by various branches of those religions. For instance Catholics consume fish on Fridays but Protestants are less likely to. Alligator is considered a fish by New Orleans Catholics, reflecting one of many local belief systems. These various belief systems are largely reflected by the various sects of the Abrahamic (and other) religions.

What is interesting for me, as a scholar of food, agriculture and diet, are the prohibitions, which can also be expressed as taboos in other non-Abrahamic cultural / spiritual beliefs, on consumption of various varieties of food, or the mixing of various foods.

This is particularly strong in the Jewish Kosher tradition, around shellfish, mixing of milk products with meats, consumption of pork and so on.

This prohibition is echoed in the Islamic fatwa against the consumption of pork as haraam (forbidden). If we consider why these particular foodstuffs have been forbidden, we can propose that there are good reasons for doing so. Pigs have long been considered dirty, although this is largely a condition of their domestication and scavenging nature. Imagine also, in the Middle East, pork would have been more likely to spoil, given the associated pathogens from its living in close association with humans, exacerbated by the hot climate.

Further, as scavengers pigs are prone to infection by various helminths (worms) such as tapeworm and roundworm, which are readily passed onto those who consume their meat, weakening and often killing people if not treated.

It is also interesting to consider the fact that pork, is said to be closest to human flesh (in Polynesia humans were called “long pig”) when cooked and consumed, so a further, obvious reason for taboo can be postulated.

Considering shellfish, why would these be forbidden? Look no further than dinoflagellate toxins (caused by so called red tides, a fairly common global event) that can cause paralysis and death – and are impossible to detect without modern laboratory equipment. Shellfish are also readily prone to spoilage if not kept properly without refrigeration. Crustacea such as crayfish, lobster and prawns are bottom feeders, literally and scientifically, consuming detritus at the bottom of the food chain. Crayfish and lobster, for instance are noted to congregate around sewer outfalls and are also prone to rapid spoilage.

Cholera outbreaks are associated with the consumption of raw shellfish, particularly in Peru, Chile and Ecuador (ceviche, etc.) where this is a common practice. So again, using religion to reinforce this absolute interdict, followers are protected and are more likely to survive than those who do not follow that religious belief. This provides an evolutionary as well as an economic advantage. Because the population will be less prone to infections, plagues or parasites, it is less likely to be unwell and able to be economically productive and to be able to contribute to the community, the church, the faith, etc. Therefore an evolutionary advantage emerges from such an interdict, providing increased resilience or a tendency to reinforce antifragility in individuals, in communities and in religions, benefiting all who subscribe to these interdicts. So while the religion may be based on a myth, the related interdicts and taboos reinforce the power of those who have logically and experientially curated and evolved the heuristics to improve on the lot of those who follow these shared belief systems. Those on the margins or those cast out or rejecting such systems would become prone to genetic and economic erosion and extinction.

I thought I would share these considerations with the authors as I believe they provide some useful practical examples of application of the sort of heuristics, expressed as a religious taboo or interdict, able to confer practical and real social advantages. Given the nature of this forum I don’t really want to go much further beside say that these examples can be extended to other foods, seeds, poison fruits, mixing of dairy and other foods, ways of food storage and treatment, etc. that have bearing on the how risk and religion are managed and analysed.

Excellent article. I concur with Paul Johnson. Very sad that AP Economics includes so little real economics and so much of the bogus mechanistic/mathematical type.

Constant provides an enlightening look at the concept of liberty in ancient western civilizations. For the ancients, liberty came through collective and direct participation in the polity. Life was affirmed through the polity: the alternative was to live as a barbarian. Freedom came collectively and was a privilege that could be taken away by the polity. Constant doesn’t mention that in some way such privileged liberty is similar to that of the towns and burghs that developed during the Medieval period, where citizens faced returning to manor life should they not temper themselves to the rules of the city (to be sure, the liberty that emerged in Medieval burghs resembled more closely individual modern liberty).

Constant delivered his lecture in 1819, but his insistence on affirming that modern liberty is individual – as opposed to the collectivized liberty of the ancients – is as important today as it was then. He criticizes Rousseau , de Mably, and Montesquieu for conflating ancient and modern liberty in an attempt to assert the power of the state – and those at its helm. Still today – though perhaps without reference to ancient philosophy – illiberal thinkers assert that liberty comes through the state and is not held individually. In a very nice small section on commerce, Constant talks about ‘owning’ being merely a use-right to a piece of land; something we see today in the bundle theory of rights.

He ends with a beautiful call for institutions to carry out the moral education of their citizens, not by forcing upon them some interpretation of morality, but by respecting their individual rights and creating proper incentives for moral behavior and civic participation. He mentions institutions in the context of the work of the legislature, but doesn’t say explicitly that all such institutions must come from the state, leaving one to think he refers not only to institutions of government but also those created by the culture and the market.

Clearly, not being able to borrow capital has a tremendous negative direct effect on entrepreneurship, since it will severely constrain the size of new ventures, no matter how many people would like to be entrepreneurs. I wonder if indirectly it could help. Without mortgages, income that would go to payments of principle and home ownership would be saved (partly at least) and be available as capital for profit-making ventures. Has anyone studied this effect?

John Quiggin: Thanks for your comment on Pew. You have a good point about the importance of baseline numbers. Unfortunately the Pew survey is unclear as to who its survey respondents are. They indicate that they surveyed the membership of the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS publishes journals, and it includes a large share of academics. Also, its membership includes many outside the hard sciences, specifically in the notorious field of psychology. Hence, the Pew survey isn’t useful as a baseline. I just finished a study in which I actually found a higher rate of D affiliation among hard scientists in elite liberal arts colleges than in the Pew survey, so there is something wrong with it. In fact. some of the past AAAS presidents have been psychologists. A good survey of nonacademic scientists would be a good baseline. When you find one, please let me know. Thanks. ML

On Bill Allen: One day, when I was an economics graduate student at UCLA, I was waiting for the Bunche Hall elevator. Prof. Allen was waiting as well. I didn’t know him, he had been on leave when I was an undergraduate. Waiting for the elevator, he was friendly and talkative. Afterwards, I asked someone who he was. When they told me he was an economics professor, I was surprised because he had been so friendly and nice!

I enjoyed listening to the interview, thanks to all involved in putting it together.

Much of this introductory chapter to Hayek’s 1948 work deserves ample praise: that rationalist epistemology leads to an ever-encroaching desire to design state-imposed solutions; that individualism recognizes that man in a free state will achieve more than is possible laboring under centralized intelligent design; that true individualism is only selfish in the sense that the individual self directs his own affairs, whatever his egoist or altruist intentions; and that equality is a two-sided coin such that pursuing equality of treatment necessitates inequality of results, and vice versa.

Unlike some other individualist theorists, his attack on state authority and especially its roots in rationalism is made largely on practical terms. He doesn’t say that statism encroaches on man’s “rights” or on moral principles. Rather, he makes the simple observation that individuals should direct their own affairs because they each are aware of the particulars and the intended objective of those affairs. Society at large and bureaucrats as its representatives simply can not know the ends that men seek in their several endeavors and can not devise all the practical means to achieve them.

Certainly arguing for a liberal social order from a rights-centered perspective (like that of Locke, Rand, or Nozick) has its own pitfalls. But what if the problem is not with Hayek’s airtight reasoning of matching the actor with his wants, but with his presumption that the correct object of analysis is the individual and not society? If the reader believes that social goals are more aspiring than individual goals, Hayek’s arguments could be used against him: just as it is more practical for individuals to know and direct the pursuits of the individual, it is likewise more practical for society to know and direct the pursuits of society. It is not clear that Hayek has established methodological individualism before arguing for political individualism.

This should not be a difficult proposition. As societies have become less autocratic and more responsive to democratic impulse, they have also become more tailored towards individualistic ends. Post-war rationalist planners (conservative and liberal) emphasize large welfare states to achieve largely individual goals instead of leviathan state actors to achieve collectivist goals. In other words, history is on the side of the methodological individualist. Yet Hayek did not know this in 1948, and should stress that point more.

What logically follows from this is that rationalist planners would reduce the ends (and the means) of human pursuits to a least common denominator. As Hayek puts it, “The concentration of all decisions in the hands of authority itself produces a state of affairs in which what structure society still possesses is imposed upon it by government and in which individuals have become interchangeable units with no other definite or durable relations to one another than those determined by the all-comprehensive organization.” (p.27) What is lost is individuality and the localized functions of civil society. Even for those who have communitarian or anti-individualist preconceptions, this is a tragic development.

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The Adam Smith Problem has beset philosophers and economists since the time of the man who is its source. What is the best way to integrate the insights of the Wealth of Nations with the ethical theory of the Theory of Moral Sentiments? While consensus has not yet been reached authors still try to resolve the tension. Vernon Smith, the father of experimental economics, attempted to resolve the problem by making an appeal to Adam Smith’s description of the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.

The propensity that Vernon Smith points to is certainly a component of Adam’s system, but in attempting to resolve the Adam Smith Problem by simply highlighting this propensity seems to ask forces other questions into focus. Assuming that Adam Smith had a singular vision of human nature in some sense, where does the individual’s propensity to exchange emerge? According to David Hume reason is a slave to the passions, which Adam Smith would have been familiar with as it affected the development of his own moral theory. Here a problem arises, if the propensity to exchange is simply the result of an innate principle of action, as Vernon Smith implies, then one needs to determine if this action falls under ethical scrutiny or not. If Adam Smith does not consider natural and uncontrolled actions of the individual, e.g. sneezing, twitching, worthy of ethical consideration as they fall outside of the realm of the individual’s control and thereby are incapable of being done in sympathy with the Impartial Spectator, then how does one square a natural principle with ethical analysis? Perhaps if Vernon Smith had described the propensity to exchange as some type of irreducible good then we could see that it could then serve as a reason for action that would first be described by and ethical system, i.e. it would be fitting to discuss in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and then followed by sound advice on instantiating the good in ones affairs, i.e. the Wealth of Nations would give advice on making it a reality. The point of all this is to say that while Vernon Smith seems to be making a contribution to solving the Adam Smith Question, we are left with further questions that need to be answered.

People believing firmly in free market and voluntary exchange efficiency (just missed some fluctuations in Q.16 and negative externalities in Q17) are wrong and “Unenlightened”.

People believing after USSR economy TOTAL failure and China transition to market economy that voluntary transactions are inefficient and only Gosplan could succeed to organize it are right and enlightened? Are you sure Q16-17 really helpful?

BTW, conservatives actually able to count negative externalities.

Q14: say Farmer A hired 5 immigrants from the country w/o tradition to respect property and human life, dignity etc. Let Farmer A saved for a Seazon $100K his costs (taxation, salary) and shared part of $100K among his product consumers. So, public wealth increased $100K. OK, now, close to the end of the Seazon (game almost over, last move of the gamer could be very unpleasant) this immigrant workers grabbed and killed farmer B and raped farmers’ C daughter and escaped to Mexico.

Public losses counted say $5 million at least. So, conservatives actually count negative externalities, some libertarians so stubbornly ignore (Caplan vs. Friedman):

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/06/milton_friedman_10.html

The main point of Macfie’s article, The Invisible Hand of Jupiter (1971), is to analyze, and attempt to reconcile, Smith’s various uses of the famous, yet mysterious, “invisible hand” metaphor throughout his work.

The original use of the invisible hand is in Smith’s History of Astronomy, an early essay written by Smith, which was published posthumously. In History of Astronomy, the invisible hand belongs to the Roman god Jupiter, and is used by polytheistic “savages” to explain seemingly irregular natural phenomena that interrupt the status quo (e.g., lightning, thunder). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and Wealth of Nations (WN), the invisible hand, assumed by Macfie, among others, to belong to the Christian Deity, is a mechanism of coordination that guides people’s self-love in order to achieve universal benevolence.

While the uses of the invisible hand seem contradictory, Macfie contends they are not. He suggests that the use of the invisible hand in History of Astronomy was merely where Smith first coined the phrase, and has no significant bearing on its later use in TMS and WN. Macfie interprets the invisible hand metaphor in TMS and WN to be Smith’s attempt to express “his own view as to the relation between divine guidance, the system of nature, and human behavior”, accordingly becoming the energizer of his entire system of thought (pp.598-99).

While Macfie’s interpretation may be plausible, there is another way to interpret Smith’s use of his famous metaphor. I believe that Smith used the invisible hand metaphor when talking about things beyond human understanding. In History of Astronomy, the savage ascribes lighting, a natural occurrence that he cannot understand, to the mood swings, and invisible hand of Jupiter. In TMS/WN, Smith employs the same invisible hand metaphor when he talks about markets; in doing so, he suggests that people cannot understand why order emerges spontaneously when people pursue their own ends in free markets, but can merely observe that it does. Perhaps this emergent order in markets can be attributed to a benevolent Deity, but, if the use of the metaphor is consistent with its use in History of Astronomy, Smith argues that the cause of this order is outside the realm of human understanding. With this interpretation of the invisible hand, Smith’s seemingly contradictory uses of the metaphor can indeed be reconciled.

I do not share Eric’s confidence in perfectly and justly adminsitered providence.

If we want things to be better on earth, I do not think we should wait for providence. We may have to wait for a very long time, and poor, starving and vulnerable populations worldwide need out compassion and support today, not whenever providence thinks it is time to do it.

John, I do not believe you understand my point. Computed as discrete changes, which is what you do, the percentage difference of the premia (college versus high school) is not equal to to the difference of the percentage premia (college versus base minus high school versus base). You are implicitly using a false assumption; it is the same false assumption made by the Mexican government in the example I cited: that the difference of the percentage changes (+50 – 33.3) is the percentage change of the difference. It causes you to greatly overestimate the education premium.

I am and always have been surprised by the “cartel” view of taxis. No one calls the Maine lobster industry a cartel. Yet surely and appropriately it is. The lobster fishery is a common access resource. So, too, are the streets of a city. Part of the income enjoyed by lobster fishermen is a scarcity rent. So, too, is the price of a taxi and a taxi-cab medallion. Cities for many, obvious political-economy reasons are awful at managing common access to the streets. Nonetheless, the social value of Uber is not to lower the price of a taxi, which should be even higher in some cases, but to offer the consumer a more technologically efficient way of delivering the scare good

This day 31 Aug 2022 we revised the pdfs to make rectify our reproduction of the 1826 error—that is, we’ve changed “myself” to “yourself.” Thank you again Professor Tasset!