Tag Archives: Adam Smith

Adam Smith thought there were two economies – meritocratic for the poor and powerless and anti-meritocratic for the powerful. There is also a legal double-standard of justice reflecting this. Steal a hundred go to jail; steal a million, get promoted. Accountability is inversely proportional to status? Stumbling and MumblingAdam Smith's two economiesChris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

The recent book by Jesse Norman simply entitled “Adam Smith” is a pleasure to read. There are of course innumerable books on the founder of the political economy, so why another one? Norman’s book is directed toward that, at times elusive, general educated reader, and has, in my opinion, three objectives: (i) to situate Adam Smith in his time, both intellectually and politically, (ii) to argue that there is a remarkable consistency between the Adam Smith of the Theory of Moral Sentiments,...

Frank Li is a Chinese ex-pat that settled in America after receiving a PhD in the US. He is an electrical engineer and entrepreneur.His take is informed from both the Chinese and American (Western) points of view and he offers a reasonably objective analysis in comparison to the largely one-sided and ill-informed one that one generally encounters in the West. His work covers the social, political and economic spectrum but this one focuses on economics. The dramatic rise of China over the...

Abstract J M Keynes carefully read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) before he was 28. Of extreme importance to Keynes was Smith’s categorization of a group of upper income class citizens, whose speculative and financial interactions with the private banking industry created a very severe danger to the society as a whole, as being projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals. Keynes’s description of Smith’s projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals in the General Theory,...

Some good quotations. The Case for Concerted ActionJoan Robinson And Nicholas Kaldor On Antagonism To Keynesian IdeasV. Ramanan

Must-read in full. It's short and to the point.The meaning of "value" is one of the most pertinent questions in economics and political economy. Michael Hudson has been emphasizing this for some time, as have Marxists and Marxian. Consideration of value of other than as price revealed in competitive markets is ruled out in conventional economics by methodological assumptions. What we value and how we value it is one of the most contested, misunderstood and important ideas in economics....

Apt quotes.Militarism is about "glory."EconLogAdam Smith on the Bipartisan Support for Attacking Syria David Henderson | research fellow with the Hoover Institution and professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CaliforniaSee also"Glory."Defend Democracy PressA Dangerous and Ridiculous Europe: Macron and May are dreaming to repeat the Libya crime against Russia, a nuclear superpower!also "Pundits and the media are making John Bolton’s wildest dreams come true: in...

Debunking the persistent wages-fund and lump of labor fallacies. Thirty years after Hoyt, Leopold Amery delivered a series of lectures in which he evaluated The Fallacies of Free Trade, paying particular attention to Smith's "terminological inexactitude." Smith's concept of capital viewed the capital of a nation as merely an aggregate of individual capitals. The difference, Amery explained, was that an individual's capital "is the result of saving, and grows by saving from profits or by...

Some keeper quotes, and some parallels with today.Global InequalityThe bitterness of Adam SmithBranko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Setting the record straight.AeonThe real Adam Smith Paul Sagar | lecturer in political theory in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London