Yesterday, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton delivered a lecture on “Economic failure or failure of economics?” (see here) as part of the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Tercentenary Week. In brief, the first half of his lecture sounded a lot like one of Tucker Carlson’s monologues. Among other things, Professor Deaton described the despair and declining life expectancy of blue-collar workers in North America, but the second half of the lecture was just a hypocrital mishmash of debunked progressive ideas (I don’t need to be lectured about inequality by a tenured professor at Princeton) and made no mention of Adam Smith’s ideas or writings.
One aspect of the lecture, however, that caught my attention was Professor Deaton’s critique of Lionel Robbins’s “infamous” definition of economics as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends (see below). But this critique begs the question, How else should we define economics? Although Deaton himself did not bother to provide an alternative definition of economics, I wonder, for example, what definition the great philosopher-economist Adam Smith would have preferred.
