prior probability

After a full day of panels at this year’s Adam Smith conference in Glasgow, I will be watching the Group C match between Scotland and Morocco at Boteco do Brasil in the Merchant City tonight.

This time around, the weather in Glasgow is cold (by Florida standards) and rainy, so I am reblogging some pictures from my 2023 visit to Glesga, Scotland’s friendliest city.

I will be attending a joint meeting of British Academy and the International Adam Smith Society (IASS) on “The World in 1776/2026: The Wealth of Nations at 250″ at the University of Glasgow (pictured below) for the remainder of this week. Among other things, I will be presenting my work-in-progress (with Alain Alcouffe) on Adam Smith’s intellectual encounters in Geneva in late 1765-early 1766 as well as my forthcoming book (with Salim Rashid) Beyond the Adam Smith Problem: Ethics, Economics, and Society. The full program of this week’s Adam Smith conference is available here.

During my brief stint in London this week (I am now en route to Glasgow by train), I was able to visit the Wallace Collection to see a special exhibition featuring more than 50 original works of art painted by Sir Winston Churchill, the first major retrospective of Churchill’s paintings since his death. More details are available here and here. Update (11:00 pm GMT): I did some digging and discovered that the future prime minister wrote an essay “Painting as pastime” in the early 1920s. What began as a mere hobby, however, became a pursuit of passion over the course of Churchill’s momentous life. Bonus link: the Wallace Collection’s Winston Churchill: The Painter exhibition catalogue (pictured below) is available here.

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, I have been featuring each of the sections of Smith’s magnum opus on my blog. Below, for example, is a compilation of my previous blog posts on Book IV of The Wealth of Nations:

1. Adam Smith calls bullshit!
2. Adam Smith on the economics of war
3. Some final thoughts on Book IV, Chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations
4. Adam Smith’s finest chapter
5. Whose hand?
6. Adam Smith, anti-racist
7. Adam Smith, the Bank of Amsterdam, and the fetish of trade balances
8. Some final thoughts on Book IV, Chapter 3 of The Wealth of Nations: of absolute advantage
9. Adam Smith the pragmatist
10. Adam Smith’s critique of crony capitalism
11. Adam Smith’s paradoxes
12. Adam Smith’s subtle critique of bilateral trade treaties in Book IV, Chapter 6
13. Adam Smith’s detour on seignorage
14. Adam Smith’s scathing critique of Spanish colonialism
15. Adam Smith’s scathing critique of European colonialism more generally
16. Top Ten Plays in Part 3 of Chapter 7 of Book IV of The Wealth of Nations
17. Das Adam Smith Koloneiproblem
18. Adam Smith’s scathing critique of the East India Company’s double monopoly
19. The true villains in The Wealth of Nations
20. Doctor Quesnay’s fallacy
21. In praise of natural liberty: some closing thoughts on Book IV of The Wealth of Nations

In all, I wrote up 21 separate blog posts on this part of Smith’s treatise between 9 February and 5 March of this year. (See also here, here, and here for compilations of my previous posts on Books I to III of The Wealth of Nations.) Bonus link: You can order an “Adam Smith Wealth of Nations Great Books Graphic T-Shirt” (see below) here, via Liberty Maniacs.

That is the title of this beautiful novella by Mark Richard Robinson, who I had the honor of befriending in Broxbourne, England, these past few days. Update (3:00 pm GMT): I have now finished reading the good Reverend Robinson’s poignant and pensive work of autobiographical fiction. He not only addresses an important philosophical question — the relationship between faith and belief — his work is also a modern-day sequel to two of Seneca’s most timeless essays: “On the Shortness of Life” and “On Providence“. (As a literary aside, I would also have loved to read Robinson’s story from the perspective of his adulterous colleague!)

As a follow-up to my previous two posts (see here and here), I want to pose another question to my fellow admirers and students of Adam Smith, another fundamental “Adam Smith problem,” so to speak. In Book III of The Wealth of Nations, Smith traces the progress and prosperity of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire, and he notices a broad but inexorable historical pattern: the presence of law and liberty in urban areas and the absence of law or liberty in rural areas, or in the immortal words of Adam Smith, “Order and good government, and along with them them liberty and security of individuals, were … established in cities at a time when the occupiers of land in the country were exposed to every sort of violence.”

For Smith, in short, European cities became prosperous because of two key ingredients: law and liberty, both of which combine to produce economic prosperity. Although my own view is that Smith’s historical conclusion is correct, we must now consider a causal question in addition to the delicate line-drawing question I posed in my previous post. Simply put, what if the arrow of causality is the other way around? What if economic prosperity produces some combination of law and liberty? Or in the alternative, what if it’s another independent variable — say, something like “culture” — that is doing all the causal work?

Continuing with my series of blog posts commemorating the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, below is a compilation of my previous blog posts on Book III of Smith’s magnum opus. (Nota bene: Book III is the shortest part of Smith’s treatise, so I was able to cover this ground in just four posts.)

1. Adam Smith on the gains from trade
2. Adam Smith’s timeless critique of feudalism and slave labour
3. Adam Smith on liberty and good government
4. Adam Smith’s revolution

Following up on my previous post, I want to share two major Smithian themes from my rereading of Book 2 of The Wealth of Nations as well as pose a question to students of Adam Smith:

1. Theme #1. Economic liberty is crucial. As a general rule, people should be free to pursue their private interests, and the government does more harm than good when it protects its domestic market from foreign competition or by otherwise impeding the free flow and movement of goods and services.
2. Theme #2. But so too is law. Every rule — even Smith’s general rule in favor of liberty — has to have an exception, right? Smith, for example, is willing to tolerate some restrictions on liberty, such as the elimination of small denomination bank notes and the legal regulation of interest rates, when those restrictions promote the general welfare or otherwise protect a larger group of people from harms caused by a few.
3. The Adam Smith Question. These two themes combine to produce what I consider to be the real Adam Smith problem: how can we prevent Smith’s pragmatic exception from swallowing up his general rule in favor of liberty? That is, where should we draw the line between law and liberty?