Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Happy “1st of tha Month“! My previous post presented Adam Smith’s analysis of the psychology of lotteries. In summary, we buy lottery tickets out of the “vain hope” we might win a jackpot, i.e. we are motivated by the size … Continue reading →

A strong case can be made that Adam Smith is the first behavioral economist, for he diagnoses not one but two major cognitive quirks in Paragraph 26 of Chapter 10 of Book I of The Wealth of Nations: the overconfidence … Continue reading →

To set the stage for the last part of my survey of Adam Smith’s use of probability in The Wealth of Nations, which I will resume on Monday, August 31st, below are links to some of the ground we have … Continue reading →

In my previous post, we saw Adam Smith’s lottery analogy in Book I, Chapter 10 of The Wealth of Nations — or what I now like to call the “The Allegory of the Lottery” — where Smith describes the probability … Continue reading →

Thus far this week (see here and here), we have pored over two intriguing selections from The Wealth of Nations — intriguing because Smith refers to the concepts of probability and risk in both of those passages in order to … Continue reading →

My previous post explored the first of three passages in The Wealth of Nations in which Adam Smith explicitly refers to the concept of probability. Today, I want to discuss another such passage: the retaliatory tariff passage in Book IV, … Continue reading →

Happy Paris Liberation Day! (And Happy Birthday to yours truly!) In my previous post, I introduced and surveyed three separate passages from The Wealth of Nations in which Adam Smith refers in one way or another to the concept of … Continue reading →

In a previous post, I asked whether Adam Smith was a closet Bayesian, and I concluded that post with a reference to an obscure but intriguing paper titled “A study of Adam Smith’s original contributions to economic theory and decision … Continue reading →

I was listening to a rebroadcast of an old recording of American Top Forty with the legendary Casey Kasem on my second-favorite SiriusXM channel — 70s on 7 — the other day when this oldie by the musical duo Pratt … Continue reading →