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Tag Archives: Economics
Tobacco, textiles, and wine: the immortal Adam Smith
Nota bene: This is the next installment of my multi-part review of Adam Smith’s 1784 pamphlet Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, american-revolution, Economics, History, Politics, Trade, wine
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France, England, and the immortal Adam Smith
Thus far (see here and here), we have studied the first three passages in Adam Smith’s 79-page pamphlet: Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth … Continue reading
Revisiting another Adam Smith problem
Moving on (see here), we now turn to the shortest selection in Adam Smith’s 79-page pamphlet: Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations … Continue reading
Adam Smith on wealth, power, and the self-correcting nature of markets
Last week (see here and here), I mentioned how Adam Smith had published a 79-page pamphlet in 1784 containing 13 separate inserts or “additions” to the first two editions of The Wealth of Nations (1776, 1778). Of these 13 inserts, … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, Economics, economy, finance, Markets, Politics
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Adam Smith and the division of labor: cure or curse?
The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations (WN, I.i-iii) are devoted to the division of labor. Although Adam Smith will later have some bad things to say about the individual effects of the division of labor in Book … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, division-of-labor, Economics, History, Philosophy, Politics, specialization, the-wealth-of-nations
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Adam Smith counterfactual
A counterfactual is a statement about what would have happened if a past event had been different. It’s a “what if?” scenario, considering an alternative reality where something that actually occurred did not, or vice versa. On this note, below … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, cognitive-dissonance, commissioner-of-customs, Economics, History
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Das Problem des Reichtums: What does Adam Smith mean by *wealth* in The Wealth of Nations?
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of my forthcoming survey of Adam Smith problems with Salim Rashid: “’Wealth’, in the words of Robert L. Heilbroner, ‘is a fundamental concept in economics—indeed, perhaps the conceptual starting point for the discipline.’ … Continue reading
A Coasian critique of Kurt Gray’s harm thesis: part 1 of 3
Yesterday, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s review (see here) of Kurt Gray’s new book Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground on pp. 63-65 of the January 20th issue of The New Yorker. Among … Continue reading
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Tagged Economics, Ethics, kurt-gray, Politics, reciprocal-harms, Ronald Coase
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A provocative Parisian pamphlet
(Author’s note: below is Part 3 of 3 of my series of blog posts on Adam Smith’s first visit to Paris.) The pamphlet, Richesses de l’etat, took Paris by storm and stirred up an enormous debate about royal finances. (Darnton … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, Economics, finance, History, Paris, Politics, roussel-de-la-tour, taxation
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Das Adam Smith Metaproblem?
I presented Die Adam Smith Probleme — a burgeoning work-in-progress that I have co-authored with Salim Rashid, who wrote The Myth of Adam Smith (available here) — at a special joint session of the History of Economics Society (HES) and … Continue reading
prior probability 