Update: In anticipation of the upcoming annual meeting of the International Adam Smith Society later this month, I have made further revisions to my work-in-progress “Die Adam Smith Probleme“.
I revised my draft of “Die Adam Smith Probleme” during my train ride from Edinburgh to London, and I have just posted my revised work on SSRN (see here). Among other things, I added two new and related open problems to my growing list of unsolved Adam Smith mysteries. One has to do with Smith’s politics: is Smith really a hardcore libertarian or is he a closet progressive? (Into which quadrant in the diagram below, for example, does Smith best fit?) The other refers to Smith’s concern for the plight of the poor and his views on economic inequality: would Smith be in favor of or opposed to income redistribution?
prior probability 