prior probability

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from the antepenultimate chapter (Ch. 11) of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold. Also, while we’re on the subject of artificial intelligence, check out the following essay by our colleague Brendan McCord: “Would Adam Smith Trust ChatGPT?“)

“Were he alive today, what would Adam Smith have to say about the introduction of powerful new ‘large language models’ like ChatGPT? Would he, for example, decry ChatGPT’s potential negative impacts on our ability to think and write for ourselves, or would he maybe liken ChatGPT to the great Encyclopédie, the most ambitious intellectual project of the Age of Enlightenment, the first methodical endeavor to assemble the entire corpus of human knowledge?[1]

“Alas, it’s hard to say, for as we already saw in a previous chapter (Ch. 3), we see this very same tension in Smith’s analysis of the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations, where he paints two opposing pictures of the division of labor, one of the central insights of his book. On the one hand, Smith describes the division of labor as not just one of the major causes of prosperity but as ‘the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour ….’ in the very first sentence of The Wealth of Nations. (WN, I.i.1, our emphasis) But on the other hand, Smith paints a radically different picture of the division of labor in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. There, he explains why this very same division of labor gives rise to ‘stupidity and ignorance.’ (WN, V.x.c.24) By the same token, the same argument can be made against ChatGPT and other large language models. After all, these A.I. tools can write up a research article, translate a text, generate a blog post, narrate a story, or compose a poem. These models are so powerful that they can even program other computers. To conjure this A.I. genie out of her bottle and make her carry out any one of these tasks, all you need to do is type your command directly into your preferred chatbot or ‘A.I. assistant’ and wait a few seconds for her reply. Talk about a division of labor! No thinking required—just conjure up the genie.

“But at the same time, Adam Smith was also a huge fan of the famed Encyclopédie. In fact, the Scottish scholar had appreciated the significance of this ambitious work of erudition as early as 1756. In his letter to the authors of the Edinburgh Review of that same year, Smith (1980, p. 66) writes ‘it is with pleasure that I observe in the new French Encyclopedia, the ideas of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton, explained in that order, perspicuity and good judgement, which distinguish all the eminent writers of that nation.’ Smith not only extolled the great work of Diderot and d’Alembert in his 1756 letter; he also used his influence at the University of Glasgow to acquire the first seven volumes of the Encyclopédie.[2] These volumes were a costly acquisition at the time, taking up nearly a third of the library’s budget.[3] Just as the Encyclopédie was a symbol of the Age of Enlightenment, has the ChatGPT genie become, for better or worse, a symbol of our times? What would Smith say?”

Nota bene: Below is a short excerpt from the concluding section of Chapter 10 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Our conjectures in this excerpt are based in large part on historian Nina Kushner’s fascinating book Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Footnotes are below the fold.)

“Could the ‘Madame Nicol’ mentioned as a love interest in Colbert de Castlehill’s 18 September 1766 letter to Adam Smith have been an actress?[*] By all accounts, Madame Riccoboni–an accomplished actress and novelist–and Adam Smith–an admirer of the stage and the arts–were avid theater and opera fans during Smith’s stay in the City of Light in 1766.[1] Indeed, it is reported that ‘it is very likely Smith took recommendations from Riccoboni as to which theatrical performances to attend,'[2] and so it is not far-fetched to imagine to them attending a play or opera or concert together. What many Smith scholars, however, have failed to mention is that these theatrical venues were also the center of an elite Parisian sexual marketplace, the famed dames entretenues or ‘kept women’ of French high society.[3]

“Famous for their talent, glamor, and beauty, the femmes galantes of the French stage were the most highly-sought after women of pleasure in all Europe, models and actresses who ‘earned their living by engaging in long-term sexual and often companionate relationships with men from the financial, political, and social elites, known as le monde (high society).'[4] Although not all theater women were kept mistresses or femmes galantes, this sultry scene overlapped directly with the world of the theater: ‘It was widely understood that any woman in the Opéra, and to a lesser degree the other theater companies, was a dame entretenue, or at least wanted to be.'[5] The world of theater was thus the center of this high-end sex market because ‘being on the stage greatly increased … “sexual capital,” the desirability of a mistress and hence the prices she could command for her services,'[6] and the theater district of the French capital was teeming with high-end brothels and places of ill-repute.[7] Although we have no other evidence to indicate whether Smith himself partook in a theatrical liaison, so to speak, who knows?”

[*] For reference, here is our translation of the relevant passage in Colbert de Castlehill’s letter:

“And you, Adam Smith, Glasgow philosopher, high-broad Ladies’ hero and idol, what are you doing my dear friend? How do you govern the Duchess of Anville and Madame de Boufflers, where your heart is always in love with Madame Nicol and with the attractions as apparent as hidden of this lady of Fife that you loved.”

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

“The first letter Adam Smith wrote after arriving in Paris in February of 1764 was his official letter of resignation.[1] Smith’s resignation letter is addressed to one of his former students, Thomas Miller,[2] who was the Lord Rector of University of Glasgow from 1762 to 1764.[3] In this letter, Smith does two things. First, he officially resigns his professorship for good, and secondly, he asks that the remainder of his salary go to Thomas Young, another former student of Smith’s, who had taken over the Scottish philosopher’s lectures at Glasgow when he (Smith) had first notified his academic colleagues in the fall of 1763 that something was afoot.[4] But why did Adam Smith decide to resign his prestigious professorship instead of just taking a temporary leave of absence?[5] After all, Smith, by all accounts, was supposed to be a cautious and prudent man. Why give up a permanent professorship to become a temporary tutor?

“We know that Duke Henry’s stepfather, the British politician Charles Townshend, had intended to offer Smith the opportunity of serving as the young duke’s travelling tutor. (Corr. No. 31) In the fall of 1763, Townshend wrote to Smith, informing him that his stepson’s grand tour was now imminent. (Corr. No. 76) Upon receiving this news, Smith had a delicate and time-sensitive choice to make: he could remain in Glasgow until the end of the academic year and risk losing this opportunity to travel overseas, or he could drop everything and begin a new chapter in his life. In the event, he chose to cross the Channel with Duke Henry. Why? Was this decision based purely on financial considerations? After all, Smith was offered a lucrative compensation package by Townshend: twice as much money as he was making as a professor, plus a generous pension for life. Or did Smith just have a burning desire to travel abroad? Or was it some other reason?

“Whatever Smith’s motives were, he and the young aristocrat left for France in January of 1764, and soon thereafter Smith formally resigned his professorship in a letter dated 14 February 1764, the day after his arrival in Paris.[6] Why did Smith make such a drastic decision on his first full day in the City of Light? What was going through his mind when he resigned his professorship? Smith had been the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow for over ten years, and 15 months previously (October of 1762), the university had conferred on him the title of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.). Also, if his Lectures on Jurisprudence from the 1762-63 academic year are any guide,[7] Smith was working on a new book on law and government. Why did Smith throw caution to the wind, so to speak, and put this ambitious project—as well as his academic career—on hold at this time?”

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

“On the surface, Adam Smith’s years in academia are not all that mysterious. After all, we know that this pivotal chapter in his life began in January of 1751, when Smith was appointed Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow – then known as the College of Glasgow or ‘the College'[1] — and that it ended in January 1764, when he went overseas to France with the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch. In all, Smith was a professor at Glasgow for 13 years, which the Scottish philosopher himself once described ‘as by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honorable period’ of his life.[2] It was also during this time that Smith wrote his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, and was awarded a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree in the fall of 1762.

“What is mysterious, however, is why Smith chose to accept so many administrative posts above and beyond his full-time teaching duties. By the time he left Glasgow for good in January 1764, Smith was easily one of the most powerful and heavily-worked administrators of the college, for he had served as Quaestor, dean of faculty, and vice rector.[3] He was also involved in the delicate negotiations to finalize the new Snell Exhibition, and when it was known that he would be traveling to London, he was also asked to meet with the Barons of the Exchequer about the finances of the College.[4] In other words, Smith wasn’t just an ivory tower intellectual during his Glasgow years; he was also an administrator,[5] best-selling author,[6] and tutor to the sons of some of the most wealthy and powerful families in Britain.[7] The most important such pupil during Smith’s Glasgow period was Thomas Fitzmaurice, the younger brother of Lord Shelburne.[8] What better way to get the ear of the nobility than by becoming the private tutor to their sons? The move is quite explicable for someone who wanted a higher social status, someone on his way to rise in the world. Perhaps it is equally reflective of how Smith was perceived: a steady, reliable, and yet friendly professor.

“To recap, were Smith’s teaching duties really requiring so little time and attention? Or was the professorship a halfway house? If being a man of the world was his primary goal, then of course Smith’s tutoring and administrative activities make very good sense. Smith would be always visible, acquiring a reputation as a man of business, a genial personality, and someone who could accomplish the responsibilities he accepted.”

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

Adam Smith left Oxford “for good” in August of 1746,^[1] and he eventually “fixed his residence at Edinburgh,”^[2] where he began to deliver a series of “freelance lectures on English composition and literary criticism” somewhere in the Athens of the North.^[3]But what was the college dropout doing during the span of time between his departure from Oxford in August of 1746 and his move to Edinburgh in 1748? Also, when did Smith make his fateful move to Edinburgh? If it was not until the summer or fall of 1748, a total of two years might be “lost”!

Alas, Smith’s biographers are of no help. To begin, all we are told in Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith is that, “[a]fter a residence at Oxford of seven years” (i.e. July 1740 to August 1746), the young Smith “returned to Kirkcaldy, and lived two years with his mother; engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life” and that “he resolved to return to his own country, and to limit his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one of those moderate preferments, to which literary attainments lead in Scotland.”^[4]

Smith’s other oft-cited biographer, John Rae, adds one extra detail to Stewart’s bare-bones account of Smith’s lost years. Rae reports that “Smith returned to Scotland in August 1746, but his name remained on the Oxford books for some months after his departure, showing apparently that he had not on leaving come to a final determination against going back.”^[5] So, was the young Smith planning on possibly returning to his formal studies at Balliol College at some point? If so, he must have changed his mind, for according to Rae, “Smith concluded that the best prospect for him was after all the road back to Scotland. And he never appears to have set foot in Oxford again.”^[6]

Neither Nicholas Phillipson (2010) nor Ian Simpson Ross (2010), however, shed any light on this chapter of Smith’s life. In fact, both biographers skip the year 1747 altogether. The only thing Ross (2010, p. 74), for example, has to say is that Smith “went back to Kirkcaldy” in 1746 and then “went off to do the work that led to his world fame as a man of letters.”^[7] Phillipson (2010, p. 72) is even more terse. He simply tells us that “Smith left Oxford in late August 1746 and returned to Scotland” before changing the subject to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46 and proceeding to describe Henry Home’s “instrumental [role] in launching Smith’s career in 1748 by means of an invitation to deliver two series of lectures in the capital [Edinburgh], on rhetoric and on jurisprudence.”^[8] 

For his part, E. G. West (1969, p. 44), without citing any supporting evidence, claims that Adam Smith spent these lost years writing some of the essays that would later be published posthumously in Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects: “Much of these two years [i.e. 1746 to 1748] he spent writing. It is probable that in this period he wrote some of the belles-lettres and the essays on astronomy, ancient physics, logic and metaphysics.”^[9] But to quote Glory Liu (2022, p. xvii): “Smith left Oxford for Scotland in 1746. We know next to nothing of what happened between then and 1748 ….” In short, most of Smith’s biographers simply leapfrog from Smith’s decision to ditch Oxford in August of 1746 directly into Smith’s fateful move to Edinburgh in 1748.

But what happened in 1747? How did a college dropout with no prospects become a leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment, the man who would change the world by bringing down mercantilism and championing free trade?

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

“Adam Smith was enrolled in Balliol College for six academic terms: July 1740 to August 1746. But his Oxford period poses more questions than answers. First and foremost, what was the young scholar studying during this time? Was he really ‘studying theology with the intent of becoming an Episcopalian pastor’?[1] Is there any evidence of Smith using the Balliol College library or the primary Oxford library, the Bodleian, during his years at Oxford?[2] Also, why did he continue to hold his Snell Exhibition and continue receiving a stipend until 1749, i.e. for three additional years after leaving Oxford in 1746?[3] Lastly, was Smith ever awarded a degree by Balliol College?

“By way of background, Smith was awarded a Snell Exhibition in March of 1740. The Snell was a coveted scholarship allowing a select number of Glasgow University students to study at Oxford. This award was founded by the bequest of Sir John Snell in 1677,[4] and under the terms of his original bequest, the recipients of this award were required to study theology, take holy orders in the Anglican Church(!), and return to Scotland.[5] Although Smith eventually returned to Scotland, he never joined the clergy. In fact, it is also unclear if he was even awarded a degree by Oxford at all.[6] On the original cover page of Smith’s second great work, The Wealth of Nations, which was first published in 1776, Smith’s post-Oxford law degree and his membership in the Royal Society of London are prominently displayed: ‘Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S.’ (Smith was awarded a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree by the University of Glasgow in 1762,[7] and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in May of 1767.[8]) By contrast, the original cover page of the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759 (i.e. after Smith had attended Oxford but before receiving his LL.D. from Glasgow), makes no reference to a degree.

“But of all these college-era enigmas, perhaps the most significant one is Smith’s fateful decision in August of 1746 to ditch Oxford. More specifically, did this decision, perhaps the most momentous inflection point in the Scottish scholar’s life, have anything to do with his views on religion? Did Smith experience a crisis of faith? Did he perhaps undergo a reverse conversion, so to speak, from religion to natural philosophy? Although Smith’s religious views are unclear at best, if he was ever a devout believer at any time in his life, wouldn’t it have been while he was still young and impressionable? When Smith left Oxford for good, he was 23.”

In other news, I got to see an amazing rocket launch (Blue Origin’s impressive “New Glenn” rocket) earlier this morning from Cape Canaveral Beach, where I had a direct line of sight to the launch pad. I have posted a recording of the first stage of the launch on YouTube (below the fold):

Nota bene: Below is a short excerpt from Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society:

Adam Smith, an up-and-coming professor of jurisprudence and moral philosopher when he published the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, borrows many legal locutions to describe the moral machinations of his impartial spectator. Among other things, Smith uses the words “appeal” (TMS, III.ii.32), “judgements” (III.ii.33), “jurisdiction” (III.iii.5), “sentence” (III.ii.32), and “tribunal” (III.ii.33) whenever he is discussing the figure of the impartial spectator. But the term he uses most often to describe his imaginary being is the word “judge.” Sometimes the word judge is capitalized. Most of the time, however, it is not. In Chapter 3 of Book III of TMS, for example, Smith describes his impartial magistrate as an “examiner and judge” (III.i.6), a “great judge and arbiter” (III.iii.4), an “awful and respectable judge” (III.iii.25), and “the immediate judge of mankind” (III.ii.32), that is, with a lower-case j. But at the same time, in several other passages in TMS (see TMS, II.iii.2, III.ii.33, & III.iii.43), Smith capitalizes the word “Judge” (upper-case J). What’s going on?

Also, what kind of judge (or Judge!) is the impartial spectator? Does this imaginary magistrate refer to a mental or internal process, a fiction of our moral imaginations (our inner voice or conscience), or is he an actual external entity, a deity, or godlike “beholder,” to borrow Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young (2025)’s formulation? At first glance, Smith appears to propound the first of these two possibilities in Book III of TMS. By way of example, Smith refers to the “higher tribunal” of our own consciences in the following passage:

But though man has, in this manner, been rendered the immediate judge of mankind, he has been rendered so only in the first instance; and an appeal lies from his sentence to a much higher tribunal, to the tribunal of their own consciences, to that of the supposed impartial and well-informed spectator, to that of the man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of their conduct. (TMS, III.ii.32)

But in the very next paragraph (!), Smith describes this higher tribunal as an all-seeing Judge (capital J) or deity/godlike entity:

In such cases [i.e. when people think we are guilty of an offense we, in fact, did not commit] the only effectual consolation of [a] humbled and afflicted man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and whose judgments can never be perverted. (TMS, III.ii.33)

Notice how Smith drops the word “supposed” when he capitalizes the word “Judge,” but notice too how he deploys the same set of legal metaphors (that of magistrate and tribunal) to refer to two different entities—either to the man within the breast or to a godlike entity—depending on whether the word “judge” is capitalized or not. For Smith, then, there are fallible and imperfect “judges” and infallible and perfect “Judges.” The judge of the lower-case j is the man within the breast, while the capital J Judge is God or a “beholder.”[1] But this observation, in turn, poses a puzzle. Specifically, why are there not one but two (!) types of impartial spectator in Smith’s moral framework? Was the Scottish moral philosopher and jurisprude being esoteric or unclear on purpose? If so, why?

In a recent paper, Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young (2025, pp. 321-322) all but concede that Adam Smith paints a confusing and conflicting picture of the impartial spectator in TMS,[2] for they identify a wide variety of competing motives that Smith may have had for being intentionally evasive or esoteric on this score: pedagogical, strategic, and even theological. (To be continued …)

[1] See Klein, D., Swanson, N., and Young, J. (2025). The impartial spectator rises. Econ Journal Watch, 22(2): 296–326..

[2] Cf. Medema, S. (2023). Review of R. P. Malloy, Law and the Invisible Hand (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 45(4): 686–689, at p. 688: “… the spectator encounters what seem to be insuperable difficulties as an operational concept owing to its essential ambiguity and indeterminacy. To be blunt, who is he/she/them? Everyone has their own idea of the impartial spectator…. Or, to put matters another way, there is no impartial spectator, only conflicting visions of such.”

I will resume my series on my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society, in my next post. Today, however, I want to honor the brave and idealistic men who tried to liberate their beloved Cuba on this day 65 years ago (17 April 1961), when a paramilitary force consisting of 1,400 Cuban exiles (the legendary Brigade 2506) launched their heroic but doomed attempt overthrow Fidel Castro’s dictatorship, doomed in large part because JFK cancelled crucial air strikes as the invasion was taking place. Although the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1746 Battle of Culloden (see yesterday’s post) are separated by over two centuries (or 215 years, to be exact), the eerie parallels between both “lost causes” are not lost on me. (On this note, following the example of Scotland’s union with England, perhaps Cuba, and not Canada, should become the 51st U.S. State?) Either way, may my Cuban brothers and sisters be free and prosperous one day soon!

I will resume my series on “Das Adam Smith Problematic?” in the next day or two, but in the meantime, I want to commemorate the 280th anniversary of the Battle of Culloden, which took place on this day (16 April) in 1746, when a rag-tag Scottish army under the command of “the Young Pretender”, Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart), was decisively defeated by a British government force led by the Duke of Cumberland, thereby ending the ill-fated Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Hat tip to Alanna MacTavish (University of Aberdeen) for reminding me of this historic event during her talk on “Jacobitism and Reformed Scholasticism” at last weekend’s annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in Philadelphia!