Every time I teach my History of Capitalism course I realize all over again just how much Adam Smith has been misrepresented and misunderstood, mostly by cherry-picked quotes from ppl who've only skimmed Wealth of Nations and have no clue that Theory of Moral Sentiments exists.
I mean, I'm not a Smith fanboy by any means, but no one ever quotes the parts from WoN where he basically says that we shouldn't trust the emerging bourgeoisie's motives: they "have generally an interest to decieve and even to oppress the public," he warned.
TL'DR: It's complicated. And the 18th century was a vastly different place.
Smith had no way to conceive of the ways in which consolidation of wealth and power would accellerate, leading to the very imbalances and asymmetries he warned about in WoN. He assumed people acting in enlightened self-interest would keep some of them from becoming petty tyrants.
Reader, he was wrong.
Smith does point us to a fundamental problem in economic theory: stuff "should" happen in a certain way (Say's Law, anyone?) but we don't live in a vacuum. We aren't just pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding "rational" game pieces. We're messy & complicated.
(Ha-joon Chang is excellent on this stuff, btw. As is Andre Gorz's _Critique of Economic Reason_ and Jeff Madrick's _Seven Bad Ideas_. )
This concludes the economic thought portion of our afternoon, brought to you by class prep and coffee. We will return to our regularly-scheduled doggo pictures and lukewarm sports takes soon.
