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“John Law’s role in resolving the Water Diamond Paradox has been largely forgotten. The name now associated with it is another Scottish economist, Adam Smith. Writing over seventy years after the publication of 'Money and Trade Considered', Smith’s celebrated restatement of the paradox of value, in 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' is astonishing not for its originality, but for its similarity with John Law’s resolution decades before.”

Quote by Gavin John Adams

Book:John Law: The Lauriston Lecture and Collected Writings
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John Law: The Lauriston Lecture and Collected Writings

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Gavin John Adams

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“The Bayesian Invisible Hand … free-market capitalism and Bayes’ theorem come out of something of the same intellectual tradition. Adam Smith and Thomas Bayes were contemporaries, and both were educated in Scotland and were heavily influenced by the philosopher David Hume. Smith’s 'Invisible hand' might be thought of as a Bayesian process, in which prices are gradually updated in response to changes in supply and demand, eventually reaching some equilibrium. Or, Bayesian reasoning might be thought of as an 'invisible hand' wherein we gradually update and improve our beliefs as we debate our ideas, sometimes placing bets on them when we can’t agree. Both are consensus-seeking processes that take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. It might follow, then, that markets are an especially good way to make predictions. That’s really what the stock market is: a series of predictions about the future earnings and dividends of a company. My view is that this notion is 'mostly' right 'most' of the time. I advocate the use of betting markets for forecasting economic variables like GDP, for instance. One might expect these markets to improve predictions for the simple reason that they force us to put our money where our mouth is, and create an incentive for our forecasts to be accurate. Another viewpoint, the efficient-market hypothesis, makes this point much more forcefully: it holds that it is 'impossible' under certain conditions to outpredict markets. This view, which was the orthodoxy in economics departments for several decades, has become unpopular given the recent bubbles and busts in the market, some of which seemed predictable after the fact. But, the theory is more robust than you might think. And yet, a central premise of this book is that we must accept the fallibility of our judgment if we want to come to more accurate predictions. To the extent that markets are reflections of our collective judgment, they are fallible too. In fact, a market that makes perfect predictions is a logical impossibility.”

Invisible HandAdam SmithBayesian ProcessThomas Bayes
Book:The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't
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“Economists have always recognised that some kind of initial accumulation was necessary for the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith called this ‘previous accumulation’, and claimed that it came about because a few people worked really hard and saved their earnings– an idyllic tale that still gets repeated in economics textbooks. But historians see it as naïve. This was no innocent process of saving. It was a process of plunder.”

CapitalismExploitationEconomistPlunderOriginAdam Smith
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“The ethical autonomy the impartial spectator offers us is a deception that has the function of rendering us more profoundly sociable than we were when we were in a state of ethical childhood and dependency. Rousseau once famously remarked that while men were born free, everywhere they were in chains. In Smith’s view the chains were those of the imagination, chains that could be loosened by a common-sense, sceptical awareness of the processes by which the moral personality was formed, but never altogether thrown off. And while Smith’s account of the life of virtue lived under the direction of the impartial spectator might seem to be nothing more than a subtle deception to a Rousseaunian or a Christian, and while this fabric of deception was to trouble him at the end of his life, Smith was to argue that the satisfaction of being able to live sociably under the direction of the impartial spectator was enough for humankind, and enough to encourage the improvement of society and the progress of civilization from the self-evidently wretched condition in which it had hitherto existed.”

PhilosophyEthicsAdam SmithRousseauImpartial Spectator
Book:Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
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“Leadership is largely ignored by recent liberal theorists. I suspect that the very idea of leadership has a non-egalitarian and authoritarian quality to it, best left to those (inspired by Max Webber) with a fascination for charisma or revolution; or left to fascists or management consultants and organisational psychologists. But this neglect by liberal theorists comes at a cost. Institutions and procedures are run by imperfect human beings and without ongoing maintenance, care and investment they decay. While I do not claim that 'leadership' is a sufficient response to the challenges of institutional decay and renewal, it may well be a necessary one.”

LeadershipInstitutionsRenewalLiberalAdam Smith
Book:The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry
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“Good grief. Here is an eighteenth-century, middle class Scottish professor [Adam Smith] saying that morality is an accidental by-product of the way human beings adjust their behavior towards each other as they grow up; saying that morality is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously among human beings in a relatively peaceful society; saying that goodness does not need to be taught, let alone associated with the superstitious belief that it would not exist but for the divine origin of an ancient Palestinian carpenter.”

EvolutionMoralityAdam Smith
Book:Еволюция на всичко
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“Of, course, Chinese economic developments forms the great background for the rise of research into British political economy of the eighteenth century. Chinese policymakers and academics are increasingly interested in economic growth and the nature of international competition and tensions between the different nations. Hume and Smith discussed these questions in the eighteenth century and were a source of guidance for Great Britain in that transformative period. China has been undergoing a massive transformation from a traditional society to a modern one, from an agricultural society to a commercial one, and needs a new kind of political economy and moral philosophy to underpin this. The Scottish thinkers, Hume, Smith and Ferguson and their contemporaries debated political and economic problems and also reflected on the most appropriate ethic for the emergence of commercial society. One of the most striking features of their advice wa that it did not lead to the sort of violent revolution often associated with the French Enlightenment philosophers. On the contrary, they managed to contribute to the development and progress of Great Britain without aligning themselves with revolutionary movements. It is this aspect of their thinking that makes them attractive to many in contemporary China.”

ChinaPolitical EconomyAdam SmithDavid HumeScottish Enlightenment
Book:The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry
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“The Adam Smith that we know today was shaped by his early life and education in Kirkcaldy and Glasgow. As a bright young man he was able to benefit from gifted teachers, to read widely, and to discuss what he read with the students he spent time with. Smith clearly loved the school, the university, and the clubs and societies in Glasgow and Eddinburgh. They shaped his thinking. But we should also remember that, for all his sociability, Smith also loved to be on his own. When it came time to write the Wealth of Nations he returned to his mother's home and to the solitude of Kirkcaldy. Here he was able to arrange his thoughts during long walks on the beach. It is no surprise that a major section of Book V of the Wealth of Nations ended up being about education. Smith's own education and experience as a teacher shaped his thinking and awareness of how important education is to society.”

EducationAdam SmithKirkcaldyUniversity Of Glasgow
Author:Craig Smith
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“There is a story that George Stigler, one of the leading lights of the Chicago School of economists, gave a seminar at the University of St Andrews on Adam Smith. His opening words, "Adam Smith is alive and well, and living in Chicago," invited the heckle, "And how is the prisoner?" Given that as well as being a formidable historian of economics, Stigler was also a fabulist, the story may have got better in the telling. All the economists who have contributed to this volume have rejected the Chicago reading of Smith. Freeing Stigler's prisoner, they have shown that for Smith, it was impossible to separate economy and society. They have noted that where the Chicago reading emphasised his support for free enterprise and accepted the outcome of markets as being the best possible, Smith instead emphasised the importance of 'commercial society.”

Adam SmithChicago School EconomicsGeorge Stigler
Book:Adam Smith: The Kirkcaldy Papers
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“Today, Adam Smith is famous as the father of capitalism and an advocate of a central tenet of free market thought: that greed is supposedly good and it drives markets. This was an idea pushed by neoliberal economists, inspired by Friedrich Hayeck and Milton Friedman, who had no knowledge of the history of moral philosophy, or of Scotland. What they missed is that no gentleman of his time could ever espouse greed, least of all a professor of moral philosophy. Indeed, Adam Smith recognized greed as an economic driver, and saw it as necessary, but also realized that it was a problem for society. His work was not an espousal of greed, but rather a response to it. His work was an attempt to find a way to reign in commercial greed to support the agrarian order, which he believed to be inherently more productive than business.”

GreedNeoliberalismMoral PhilosophyAdam SmithFriedrich HayekMilton Friedman
Book:Adam Smith: The Kirkcaldy Papers
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