prior probability

Nota bene: Last month (see here), I mentioned that I would begin two new series on Adam Smith. I have already completed my first series on “Adam Smith and the ‘Absurd Prescriptions’ of Doctors“; now, as promised, it’s time to start my other series: “Adam Smith: Bureaucrat“.

In an ironic twist of fate, Adam Smith, the champion of free trade, was somehow appointed to the post of Commissioner of Customs(!) in November of 1778 — two years after the publication of his free-market manifesto, The Wealth of Nations — a position he held from February 1778 until his death in July of 1790. Smith was thus a pro-mercantilist, protectionist bureaucrat for as many years as he was a professor and moral philosopher at the University of Glasgow, but what was the promoter of perfect liberty actually doing during this final incongruous phase of his life?

To shed light on this lesser-known side of Smith’s biography, I have been patiently conducting some time-consuming and meticulous archival research in my spare time: collecting, reading, transcribing, and summarizing more than 1,100 letters signed by Smith in his official capacity as customs commissioner. Let’s begin by taking a closer look at a batch of customs letters corresponding to the middle period of Smith’s 12-year stint as customs official, i.e. from the middle of September 1784 to the beginning of March 1785.

In summary, during this precise period of time (16 September 1784 to 9 March 1785) Smith signed a total of 34 separate letters and orders in his capacity as Commissioner of Scotland’s Board of Customs. What do these almost-three dozen pieces of customs correspondence teach us? Some of the letters involve core customs-enforcement actions, such as seizures of contraband and prosecutions of smugglers, while others concern internal accounting or administrative matters, such as employee reprimands and reimbursements of expenses. Starting tomorrow, then, I will survey each of these letters (one or two at a time) in greater detail to reveal this unsung side of Smith’s biography: his life as a British bureaucrat.

Update: I will begin a new Adam Smith series in my next post; in the meantime, allow me to share this “oldie but goodie” by the legend George Benson, which was playing on my car radio (shout out WUCF Jazz), brightening up my otherwise wet-and-dreary Monday-morning blues:

Friday (16 October) would have been my father’s 83rd birthday. Here is a link to his obituary, along with some additional photos.

Alternate title: Dog bites man

According to this recent report (see also here) from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group (Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein, “The Anatomy of Tariff Pass-Through into Consumer Prices“), Trump’s tariffs raised consumer goods price inflation in the U.S. by [only!] 2.6%. File under “Department of Underestimation.”

I already knew that the Effective Altruism movement is the biggest scam since snake oil, i.e. a kind of secular absolution for the amoral among us. (See here, here or here, for example.) But check out this brutal takedown of the logic of longtermism — and of consequentialist moral theory more generally! — over at the parody website More Wrong (https://morewrong.lol/; hat tip: Kottke), “Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive“:

ΔL = D/G − p
D = donation per bag of fentanyl sold ($1.80)
G = GiveWell cost per life saved (~$5,500)
p = probability a given bag is fatal (~1/4,000)

Trigger warning: Today’s post will be deliberately provocative and inflammatory!

Instead of recognizing an econ giant like Richard A. Posner or Thomas Sowell, the 2026 Nobel Prize in “economic sciences” (see here) went to Robert Hall (Stanford) and Michael Woodford (Columbia). Alas, this year’s prize will be all but forgotten by the end of this week, if not sooner. (For a contrary view, see here, but feel free to compare all four of their Wikipedia pages linked above if you don’t believe me.)

My wife and I finally saw Aaron Sorkin’s long-awaited sequel to The Social Network this past weekend. To minimize spoilers, here are my top-three takeaways:

• The Good: Should Facebook “fact-check” political ads? My favorite scenes in The Social Reckoning are the tense exchanges between Jeremy Strong and Bill Burr (see, for example, the film clip posted below), but the sequel is nowhere near as good as The Social Network.
• The Bad: Alas, the sequel is a day late and a dollar short, for as evil as Zuck might be [*], Facebook and other social media platforms are now “small potatoes” compared to, say, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
• The Ugly: If The Social Reckoning is to be believed, Facebook played a pivotal role in the chain of events leading up to the violent insurrection in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. (Or to be more precise, it was a series of changes that Facebook made to its secret algorithms that created the conditions that led to J-6.) The sequel thus poses a critical counterfactual question: would J-6 have still occurred had these behind-the-scenes changes not been made?

[*] Is Zuckerberg, for example, lawful evil, neutral evil, or chaotic evil?

Did you know that it was Cristóbal Colón (a/k/a Christopher Columbus) who, in addition to his maritime exploits, initiated the longest-running lawsuit in history? According to Daniel Voelker (see here or here), an attorney who has conducted extensive research on this epic case, the so-called Pleitos Colombinos (“Colombian Lawsuits”) began with a contract drawn between Colón and his royal patrons, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon:

“The royals agreed, in writing, known as the ‘Capitulations of Santa Fe,’ to give [Colón] and his heirs ‘ten percent of all the wealth he discovered and claimed for the Crown on his voyages made on their behalf’ as well as land grants, extravagant titles and untold potential powers in the New World, in perpetuity.”

According to Voelker, the contract would be valued at over $100 trillion USD in today’s currency and would have made the Colón family the wealthiest in recorded history, but it was not to be. Colón fell out of favor and the royals reneged on their agreement. (The Crown’s defense to the lawsuit was that it was Martín Alonso Pinzón, the captain of the Pinta, who actually discovered the New World!)

The legendary explorer thus spent his final days poor and destitute, and his lawsuit dragged on for three centuries and involved ten generations of the Colón family. Postscript: This four-volume, 3,600-plus page collection (pictured below) contains the main legal documents in this historic case.

Isn’t this ballad one of the most beautiful love songs of all time? I think so!