There is a new blog I have discovered for myself. Well, the blog itself is not new, but it is a blog of a guy, who's book I have enjoyed reading. Took me some time to google him and - surprise! - the guy is actually a very serious chap at the University of Glasgow... Despite the fact that I know him from his book on negotiations (which has helped me a great deal back when I was reading it) - "Everything Is Negotiable", he is an economist and an avid fan of Adam Smith (just like yours truly). Having red too much crap online on Adam's views on economics from people who hardly can remember the title of "Wealth Of Nations", let alone the actual content, it was a refreshing reading, where Gavin (Gaving Kennedy is my guy's name, by the way) shits down on anyone who dares to say anything bad about his (and my) hero. His blog can be found on Adam Smith's Lost Legacy, and as a sample, I'll just do a lazy copy/paste maneuvre from his recent typical post:
‘Perhaps next economic system will work for all’: “Dear Editor: The meteor of toxic mortgage slammed into Earth and the dinosaurs of Wall Street are biting the dust. The invisible hand of the free market clenched itself into a fist and beat up the market, then held itself out for a government loan. After the economics books are rewritten, maybe Adam Smith will be taken off his pedestal, and maybe someone will invent an economic system that works for everyone, not just the favored. Maybe cooperation and benevolence are a better foundation for economics than competition and greed.” Comment It’s not a new ‘economic system’ that we need – Adam Smith did not invent one; he observed what was going on around him in the 18th century and reported on it in Wealth Of Nations. Adam Smith did not discover ‘the invisible hand of the free market’ – that is a myth. His use of the well known 18th-century-metaphor – widely used in literature at the time, and far back into classical times (it’s in Shakespeare too) was not even about markets and how they work, which he fully explained elsewhere in Books I and II in Wealth Of Nations without mentioning anything about invisible hands. There is no need to ‘rewrite’ the ‘economics’ book. The first task is to read Wealth of Nations for the very first time in the case of 98+ per cent of working economists today, and not just rely on isolated quotations torn from its context and spread about with the authority of modern ‘top’ economists, including some Nobel Prize winners. Many of them would be surprised that Adam Smith never advocated ‘greed’, nor gave a free pass, all areas, to businesses to do whatever their self-interested owners regarded as a sufficient reason, under the illusion that they were blessed by a mystical, implicitly religious’ force of an invisible hand, irrespective of the obvious flaws in such a ‘theory’ (‘pusillanimous superstition’, as Adam Smith described belief in such phenomena). Legislators on both Britain and the US were complicit in the behaviours that brought the finance system into its current crisis; for political ends they punted the socially attractive notion of lending money to people unable to sustain re-payments and disregarded the standards of prudence they claimed for their economic management. Governments caused the crisis, not Adam Smith, nor anything alleged to have been written in Wealth Of Nations.
Well done Gavin. Actually the Invisible Hand was mentioned in the Wealth Of Nations, but only once and not as an object. Must be his publisher, who did him up by putting that term in his mouth, but also making this very term an ultimate item in some people's vocabulary... But this is pop business already. Here we go:
and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
Oh, and the blog is deffinetly going to the blogroll...