|
And, John Cassidy How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities criticizes the entire field of economics. In the 18th century if you studied hard sciences you were a natural philosopher. Thus, his writings has no resemblance to modern economics commentary. His cogitations covered the entire fields of behavioral finance, macro and macroeconomics.
James Buchan The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas (Enterprise) is excellent and solely focused on Adam Smith and his writings. Nowadays, all those fields are fairly demarcated. Yet, he describes Adam Smith as a far more balanced and complex thinker than his modern followers. Skinner are very helpful in better understanding this work. Smith could not be an economist since the latter profession did not exist he had to be something else: a moral philosopher.
Thus, Smith was far more the precursor of Keynes than Milton Friedman. Cannan also provides an enlarged index that serves as a quick reference. Given that, it is challenging interpreting what he is saying in modern context. Second, it includes Edwin Cannan's summaries in the margin that assist in reading this thick tome. You may get more out of those two sections than Smith's thousand pages of writing.This book was written before the field of economics theory existed.
This is the best release of "Wealth of Nations" for several reasons. In view of the above, Smith's intellectual legacy is in part timeless. Smith also was opposed to the might of large corporation as he was suspicious of their collaborating to depress wages and their colluding on prices before laws banned such practices. Campbell and A.S. This is because he was concerned about the speculations that went inside individuals' minds just as he was concerned about the productivity of labor, small businesses, and the economy at large. Unfortunately, his writing in a contemporary setting is unreadable.
First, it is truly "complete and unabridged." So, you get the real deal, all thousand pages of it. Smith's posterity and prescience are second to none. Yet, this is not what the economic profession conveys to the outside world. They all missed more than half of Smith's message. Smith's thinking was far more complex and nuanced than the ones of his libertarian followers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan. This is because moral philosophy included all the fields that today are pretty separate such as: logic, rhetoric, psychology, sociology.
Arthur Herman How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It covers the entire Scottish Enlightenment.
In this regard, I recommend three books.
Such a broad base binomial taxonomy of all intellectual scientific fields had great advantages.
For my part, I got a lot more about Smith's thoughts from reading digested modern interpretations from others than from reading Smith's own writing.
And third, the Introduction by Robert Reich and the Commentary at the end by R.H.
That included Smith support for labor unions (at a time when labor abuse was rampant), government regulations including very tight regulation of banking.
On a more granular level moral philosophy as advanced by Smith included microeconomics, macroeconomics, international economics, behavioral finance, international economics, etc.
As a result, Smith's writings do not include such common words as: economics, recession, expansion, contraction, inflation, GDP, common stocks, and securities.
And, if you studied anything else you were a moral philosopher.
Indeed, he seems to argue for a sort of licensure system in which people, before entering economic life, have to prove a minimum standard of education. Written by a man who has organizations and lectures named after him, whose name is synonymous with free markets.Well, the following is a list of things not generally talked about - in my casual exposure to economics - in regards to this work.Smith, not surprisingly for a man of the Enlightenment, was a blank slate guy. He's not big on established churches but thinks they are inevitable unless a country has no tradition of them - like the American colonies who were just rebelling in the "recent disturbances" at the time of the book's publication. It's the private vices that become public benefits. To Smith, productive labor was only that which increased the tangible, material property of a society.
But he is skeptical of public financing and administration being able to do this. is of much more importance than opulence." Smith also is not in favor of free trade for items that are taxed by the importing country. He's a supporter of everyone being educated to a certain minimum degree. In an age where the US Pentagon admits some of its supply chains disappear somewhere overseas, Smith's admonition that free trade should not hamper national defense seems forgotten.
He also has an section on the pragmatic reasons why slavery was not conducive to the economic development of societies.Smith's work is largely known for being an extended apologia for the benefits of enlightened self-interest. (Though, of course, individual colonies did have established churches). Historically, using the argument of the re-employment of thousands of soldiers and seamen after demobilization, he doesn't see this as usually being a problem though.Smith states four maxims of good tax policy: each citizen paying in proportion to the property the state protects and enables the accumulation of , convenience of payments, certainty of amount and time of payment, convenience of payment, and economy of collection. (He also makes a not entirely unconvincing argument for standing armies being necessary. What more is there to say about a book that's been around 233 years.
Tariffs, he argues, should equal the tax load on the native manufacturer. There is a reason there are many famous quotes from this book. While Smith acknowledges that wealthy countries make great trading partners, he also notes their wealth makes them "dangerous in war and politics". He also supports retaliatory tariffs, a gradual elimination of tariffs, and notes that free trade should not proceed if those it unemploys can not easily find other employment. Smith is usually a lucid - and occasionally wry - author.
That's considered to be the founding text of modern economics. The philosopher, we're told, differs from the porter "not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education". Largely, yes. And one also wonders what Smith would have thought of the notion of a service economy. He seems, at one point, to argue for hidden taxes on luxury consumer goods - the goods that social custom does not dictate are essential to the lives of even the lowest class.What isn't in the book is any sort of mention of monetary policy - governments attempting to manipulate economies by manipulating money supplies. The marginal annotations of the Cannan edition are very good and help easily follow Smith's arguments and find relevant sections.
George Stigler, in a preface that ably sums up Smith's main points, convincingly argues - though the debt is not explicit in the text - that it isn't exactly self-interest, and not socialism's and communism's essential and necessary altruism, that motivates economic efficiency. I don't know how kind modern scholarship has been to his economic theories on European social development post-Roman Empire and the reasons for the Reformation, but they were interesting and not implausible. It's a notion developed in Smith's The Theory Of Moral Sentiments and may stem from Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Penguin Classics).
Even though he digresses into some less - at least to me - interesting topics like the history of the Bank of Amsterdam or the specifics of Britain's deficit financing in the early 18th century, his economic history is often interesting. Smith's professional progeny, with less justification and an autistic-like inability to model human nature, has largely kept the notion of people as malleable economic units whose value can simply be altered by some inputs of education.This is a book on the wealth of nations, not an argument for how trade is going to pacify the world and render borders obsolete as is the gospel sometimes preached - for at least a hundred years - by advocates of globalization. No significant mention is made of the idea of intellectual property yet he notes that "philosophers or men of speculation" have invented machines that have increased production of goods.Is Smith readable.
"Defence" notes Smith, ". Part of it rests on the general efficacy of the specialization of labor).He also makes some, on the face of it, surprising digressions into what sort of established church should be supported and if public education is worthwhile - all under the section on how the government should be spending its money. And, given the state of American public education in all its aspects, his skepticism sometimes seems still relevant and appropriate.While Smith is rightly considered a strong advocate of free trade - a large section of the book is a demolition of the then fashionable mercantile system with its attendant emphasis on gold and silver as something more than just merely convenient mediums of exchange, he does note some objections.
The Everyman's Library version is abridged -- without being advertised as so, either on Amazon OR anywhere inside the book.The Wealth of Nations is a pivotal work in the history of economics and human nature, but you'd be better off finding an edition that includes the entire work.The Wealth of Nations (Everyman's Library)
He viewed inflation as "extremely pernicious". I most enjoyed the last sections of the book on taxes and public debts. His 4 maxims of taxes are that they should be- equal, certain, convenient, and beneficial. This is in my top 5 best books of all time. The book contains ideas that Americans should possibly revisit in the near future. It is a very long read that covers a broad range of information involving economics, but well worth the time spent. I give it an A+. There are a lot of references to issues that were occurring during Smith's time that may not seem to be pertinent to the reader, but can still be applied to modern times.
Since some of the notes are pages long, this counting can take a while. Each footnote can be reached by clicking on the line where the note occurs -- but when you get to the notes, the first ten notes of each chapter are unnumbered, and you have to count, painfully, the number of square-bracketed notes, which are not even paragraphed separately. This is by far the most expensive Kindle edition of Adam Smith, and shouldn't have screwed up its notes -- the only reason for paying five extra dollars -- in this way.Let me add that the Amazon reviewing mechanism is, as usual, inadequate for reviewing Kindle editions; my review ends up one of over fifty reviews discussing the book in general, not the Kindle edition specifically. The Kindle Modern Library ebook is messed up, unusual for Modern Library Kindles. It reproduces the Carman edition of 1904, a very thoroughly footnoted (or endnoted) version.
|
