Talk:Adam Smith

Bad writing

"These views ignore that Smith's visit to France (1764–66) changed radically his former views and that The Wealth of Nations is an inhomogeneous convolute of his former lectures and of what Quesnay taught him." Whoever wrote this needs to bear in mind that this is an encyclopedia, not a place to show off how much time you've spent with the dictionary. A sentence which is more opaque than the subject it purports to explain is worse than useless, it's irresponsible. I note in passing that the opposite of 'homogenous' is not 'inhomogenous' but 'heterogenous', not that either word is appropriate here. Lexo (talk) 01:13, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Tutoring and travels

This section must be ESL, and inserting the economics of France in it seems irrelevant.--John Bessa (talk) 22:39, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

As a first step towards improving this section I have attempted, hopefully to a general consensus of satisfaction, to bring the style and structure up to 'snuff'. While I see that some of it should be either removed or expanded upon - this will have to be done later (if it is to be done by myself) as my bibliographical knowledge of Smith is lacking. I do believe this might have something to do with learning of Smith during my first semester of my first year of university. It will require some research on my part before I would be comfortable altering any of the factual data - unless of course someone else would like to take this on.

Let P = a person, x = the totality of information on this section:

 Begin Loop
   If there exists a P such that P(x') >= current Author P(x) | where x' and x =< x 
   then let P(x') = current Author
 End Loop

DmacG (talk) 08:51, 10 December 2011 (UTC) DmacG

Division of Labor

The writing surrounding this phrase is barely writing at all, and sounds, frankly, crazy.--John Bessa (talk) 22:52, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Charles Dickens reference

Don't know If it's worth mentioning in the article but Charles Dickens had character named after Adam Smith in his novel Hard Times. He is one of Gradgrinds younger children whose going through an inhumanly pragmatic education. The book is extremely critical of economics in general and there are a few nods to other economists and economic theory, anyway if people think its worth mentioning il stick it in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.76.184.49 (talk) 16:37, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Smith's effect on Scotland

I came to this page wondering if Smith was Scottish; I would have assumed, perhaps because of ingrained anti-colonial bias, that he was English. But I recently saw a Scots-made TV history that described the Scottish iron industry of the early 20th Century as making itself more competitive by taking short-cuts is social and urban planning: they forwent big-city sanitation making cities that were uninhabitable. This sounded so familiar that I asked myself if Smith was a Scot (or perhaps an anti-Scot from within). This and other conditions, the show said, triggered the mass emigrations of Scots to the New World, in particular the region of Canada where I know live and am surrounded by a slight Scottish accent. Since Smith was never mentioned in the show (neither was free-market economy), it seems probable to me that Smith is more of a symbol for an economic system that attempts to cheapen good things to make the competitive (and hence more profitable), but in-so-doing, ultimately unbalances economic equilibrium crashing local economies, and, in the early 21st Century, never fails to trash culture and the environment.

I think the "cheapening" factor is worth looking at in the context of England and Scotland, as history shows that the products of these nations were neither cheap nor shoddy; they were cost-effective because of durability. This would have been achieved in spite of Smith, and his cohort, rather than because of him. GB only collapsed as a manufacturer in the wake of WWII probably because it was not perceived as a nation vulnerable to communism and therefore not qualified for reconstruction subsidies from the victorious US.--John Bessa (talk) 17:02, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

• Both smith and Hume were Scottish (as were a number of nominally "English" engineers in the 18th and 19th century), but I'm not sure what connection they really had to the composition and quality of Scottish goods. The general issue of capitalism leading to a cheapening of "crafted" goods can be challenged empirically, but the best theoretical argument on the subject is still Marx. As such I'm not sure how much of that issue ought to be covered in a biographical article on smith himself. Protonk (talk) 18:31, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Error in "Early Life" section

In Early Life, there seem to be a few discrepancies. The first sentence is a run-on and contains a couple spliced words. I can't correct it because I have no clue what the original phrases were. There seems to be an anecdote here but it clashes with the factual nature of the section (born, went to school, etc).

" Though few events in Smith's early childhoodriverside Ca and klived herehouse at Strathendry on the banks of the Leven, [Smith] was stolen by a passing band of gypsies, and for a time could not be found. But presently a gentleman arrived who had met a gypsy woman a few miles down the road carrying a child that was crying piteously. Scouts were immediately dispatched in the direction indicated, and they came upon the woman in Leslie wood. As soon as she saw them she" threw her burden down and escaped, and the child was brought back to his mother. [Smith] would have made, I fear, a poor gypsy."[3]|group=N}}"

This is my first wiki post, so I am sort of unsure how this works. Please give me feedback if i have done this correctly or not.

--MongrelWarfare (talk) 19:32, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks for the heads up. I think i fixed it. This happens sometimes when successive groups of people vandalize the same article. We catch and revert some of the vandalism but not all of it. Protonk (talk) 20:04, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Residence

This section states that Smith's house on the Canongate survived until 1889 and references The Scotsman from the period. I've checked The Scotsman archive and aside from references to a commemorative plaque being placed can find nothing which confirms the allegation that the association between the remaining Panmure House and Adam Smith is myth.--Archher (talk) 11:00, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Heriot Watt Universitycontinue to report Panmure House as the historic residence of Smith contrary to what the Wiki entry reads. Has anyone sought confirmation on the references refered to above?.--Archher (talk) 21 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Archher (talk • contribs)

Tutoring and Travels

My strong suspicion is that Smith was engaged to teach the Duke's son polish (manners) rather than Polish (the language of the Poles). I might be wrong, mind. 220.191.169.89 (talk) 10:18, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Link to excellent discussion of Adam Smith from Jim Otteson - Russ Roberts on podcast EconTalk

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/06/otteson_on_adam.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.41.11.175 (talk) 16:32, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Published Works / The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The third paragraph refers to "Puffendorf." That is a misspelling. The name is "Pufendorf," or "von Pufendorf." (See linked page.)

It seems the origin of the error is the quote from Hutcheson. (See footnote.)

(Auxilstitute (talk) 15:34, 4 July 2011 (UTC))

Inclusion in "Further reading" section of Iain McLeans' book on Adam Smith

Y Done. Monkeymanman (talk) 20:17, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Further reading

Iain McLean, Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian: An Interpretation for the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

70.51.48.171 (talk) 16:13, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Bad scholarship

The shallowness and bias in this article is one of the reasons Wikipedia will probably never be more than a compendium of low-hanging-fruit trivia. It illustrates the degree to which commenters on Smith have (a) never actually read his WoN, or (b) never understood whatever bits they did read, or (c) didn't care what they'd read and wrote with ax in hand, grinding away.

As Chomsky said (Class Warfare (1995), pp. 19-23, 27-31): I didn't do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. There's no research. Just read it. He's pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That's the argument for them, because he thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.

He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call "national interests." He simply observed in passing, because it's so obvious, that in England, which is what he's discussing -- and it was the most democratic society of the day -- the principal architects of policy are the "merchants and manufacturers," and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, "most peculiarly attended to," no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn't have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.

This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don't have to go to Marx to find it. It's very explicit in Adam Smith. It's so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn't make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that's correct. If you read through his work, he's intelligent. He's a person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He's part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.

The version of him that's given today is just ridiculous. But I didn't have to any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you're literate, you'll find it out.

I can state that my experience agrees with Chomsky's. I read WoN, but then after reading some of the conventional appraisals and "scholarship" I felt extremely confused. I wondered whether there might be some other Adam Smith who wrote a book with a similar title. The conventional views (ably represented in this Wiki article) were diametrically opposed to everything I read in WoN and I just couldn't imagine how the authors could possibly have made such egregious errors. Later, having read Chomsky's evaluation, I felt a great sense of relief: obviously Chomsky and I had read the same book! 72.70.17.22 (talk) 19:57, 25 January 2012 (UTC)