- Happiness in terms of Usefulness
- Smith later remembered his thirteen years at Glasgow 'as by far the most useful, and therefore as by far the happiest and most honurable period of my life'. It is a typically Smithian move to construe happiness in terms of usefulness.
- Inequality Discourse
- 'This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.'
- Mathematics vs Feelings
- As economics became more scientific, so it became more mathematical; and as it became more mathematical so it became more removed from everyday life, from human institutions and human values, and indeed from the idea of value itself.
- Free Markets? (Moral norms)
- Smith recognizes tht human lives offer huge potential for individually advantageous behaviour to have not positive but negative social effects. The question then is not just why individual behaviour benefits the group, as in much evolutionary theory, but how moral norms that can effectively constrain and penalize bad individual behaviour arise at all.
- One thing that Smith gets triumphantly, monumentally right, that guarantees his place among the immortals: he sets himself to address the foundational question of how far the pursuit of individual self-interest through cultural and market exchange can yield economic growth and socially beneficial outcomes.
- 'How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.'
- For the modern world of economics -- of rational economic man, general equilibrium theory and the Efficient Market Hypothesis, is one that has borrowed very selectively from Smith.
- On Markets in General
- [Markets] were able to make their way to an efficient equilibrium even with only a few, ill-informed and incompletely rational participants.
|
|