He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. “Every individual endeavours to employ his capital so that its produce may be of the greatest value. In his 1997 book In Stormy Seas, Brian Easton (p.248) repeats “the most quoted section of classic book (1776), An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations“: To omit the “frequently” is to deny the work of literally thousands of great and good economists, almost as though one is ignorant of both economic analysis and its point of the last two centuries.Īnyway, to repeat, thanks for the correction, the Arrow-Debreu model) have been constructed, which in general say that a whole set of conditions are necessary for the invisible hand to work in any rigorous sense. Incidentally, my irritation arose from the fact that much of the last 200 odd years of economics has been an attempt to decide how often is “frequently”. My mistake, and I apologise to all readers. (The likely reason is he, or the person he took the quote from, did so is because they did not want to draw attention to the protectionist element in Smith’s thinking, which you describe.) When I wrote it up for my book “In Stormy Seas”, I did not go back and check Smith’s original. I wrote all this up in the “Listener” column, but nobody drew attention that Samuelson had clipped the Adam Smith quote too. (I have not got a precise reference to Kerr’s paper, but I discuss it in my Listener column of March 15, 1997.) Knowing it was there, I checked my original source, which was Paul Samuelson’s 4th edition of Principles (page 39), which I studied as a student. I was stimulated by Roger Kerr, who used the quote but dropped the “frequently”. Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy Ī friend sent on your email about the “invisible hand”. I am transporting it to mine (with my letter at the beginning) so that its search facility can identify it. As I did when Keith Rankin pointed out I had misquoted Adam Smith on the Invisible Hand. When scholars make mistakes it is best to ‘fess up’.
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