Selfishness is No Virtue

Greg Baldwin, President of VolunteerMatch, writes HERE:

“The Case Foundation: Why Don't People Want To Give?”

“From The Case Foundation”:

“Well, the easy answer is that it's hard to make people give because people don't really want to. The logic is simple and compelling. People don't give because we are by our nature self-interested creatures pursuing our own survival in a competitive world. Adam Smith and Charles Darwin saw us for what we are: a collection of individuals looking to get ahead, not give back.”

Comment
Greg Baldwin has got the wrong end of the stick. Adam Smith wrote in detail (Moral Sentiments, [1759- 1790), the exact opposite of Greg Baldwin’s assertion. There is precious little Smithian morality in selfishness.

Smith’s criticism of Bernard Mandeville (Private Vice, Public Benefit, 1724) is quite specific on selfishness and Greg Baldwin attributes to Adam Smith what Mandeville became notorious for – making a virtue out of selfishness, a theme taken up by Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness), another person confused with Adam Smith’s diametrically opposed and explicit views about morality. Self interest is not about selfishness.

If everybody tries takes and few give in exchange, commercial society would be impossible. The very act of exchange is about each giving something to the other party which they prefer in place of what they give up to get it.

If everybody expects others to give without them getting something back, we would soon be impoverished. Poverty is the absence of exchange relations; it is not caused by them, Greg.

Jay Richards on Selfishness

Jay W. Richards, author of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and not the Problem (2009), (15 October) writes in The American (the journal of the American Enterprise Institute) HERE:

"Greed Is Not Good, and It’s Not Capitalism"

“The Virtue of Selfishness?

You might think that greed has been bound up with defenses of modern capitalism from the very beginning. You might recall Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, who famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Ayn Rand and others seemed to extend Smith’s point by treating greed as the basis of a free economy. There are connections here of course; but Smith never argued that greed is good. His view was far different, and far more subtle.

Adam Smith argued that in a rightly ordered market economy, you’re usually better off appealing to someone’s self-love than to their kindness.

First, Smith argued that in a rightly-ordered market economy, you’re usually better off appealing to someone’s self-love than to their kindness. The butcher is more likely to give you meat if it’s a win-win trade—if there’s something in it for him—than if you’re just asking for a handout. This is, or should be, common sense.
Second, Smith knew the difference between self-interest and mere selfishness. Every time you wash your hands or take your vitamins or clock into work on time or look both ways before you cross the street, you’re pursuing your self-interest—but none of these acts is selfish. Indeed, generally speaking, you ought to do these things. Greed, in contrast, is a sort of disordered self-interest. Adam Smith, the moral philosopher, always condemned it as a vice.

Third, Smith never argued that the more selfish we are, the better a market works. His point, rather, is that in a free market, each of us can pursue ends within our narrow sphere of competence and concern—our “self-interest”—and yet an order will emerge that vastly exceeds anyone’s deliberations.

That’s the problem with socialism and all sorts of nanny-state regulatory prescriptions: They don’t fit the human condition.

Finally, and most importantly, Smith argued that capitalism channels greed. He recognized that human beings are not as virtuous as we ought to be. While many of us may live modestly virtuous lives under the right conditions, it is the rare individual who ever achieves heroic virtue. Given that reality, we should want a social order that channels proper self-interest as well as selfishness into socially desirable outcomes. Any system this side of heaven that can’t channel human selfishness is doomed to failure. That’s the genius of the market economy.”

Comment
I have criticised many times on Lost Legacy the cynical author of the Hollywood film script, Wall Street, for putting out the “Greed is Good” nonsense. Such a view had nothing at all to do with Adam Smith, either in Wealth Of Nations or Moral Sentiments.

Jay’s article is almost a perfect riposte to the Gekko libel about capitalism except for a paragraph elsewhere in it:

“In contrast, capitalism is fit for real, fallen human beings. “In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity,” Smith wrote, business people “are led by an invisible hand ... and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.” Notice he says “in spite of.” His point isn’t that the butcher should be selfish, or even that the butcher’s selfishness particularly helps. Rather, he argues that even if the butcher is selfish, he can’t make you buy his meat. He has to offer you meat at a price you’ll willingly buy. He has to look for ways to set up a win-win exchange. Surely that’s good.”

Jay compresses two paragraphs together from Wealth Of Nations to make this unnecessary point about the so-called “invisible hand”. However, the example he makes of the “butcher, brewer, and baker” paragraph (Wealth Of Nations, Book I.ii.2:27) is spot on and worthy of wider circulation.

Regular eaders of Lost Legacy will know that Smith was not referring to all “business people” being “led by an invisible hand”, but only to those in a special case when they preferred the home trade to foreign trade, the trigger for their behaviour being their risk-avoidance regarding foreign trade (Wealth Of Nations, Book IV.ii. paragraphs 1 to 9: 452-56).

However, this corection is for the record only and in no way diminishes the excellent case that Jay Richards makes against the elision of self-interest into selfishness. Bernard Mandeville (1734: Fable of the Bees ) and his modern epigone, Ayn Rand, were absolutely wrong about selfishness. Adam Smith (and Jay Richards) was absolutely right about the anti-commercial sentiments of "selfishness".

A candidate for the October Lost-Legacy Prize?

A Wild Goose Chase; Another Disappointment

In another debate elsewhere on the invisible hand in Adam Smith, which I am engaged in lightly, a contributor identified not three uses by Smith of the popular 18th-century metaphor, but four.

That sent me to the library to search out the source of the 4th use. When examined, I find the claim is in History of Political Economy in January 1990, nearly 20 years ago.

I was surprised by the revelation of a fourth invisible hand in Adam Smith that I had missed, but my surprise soon became wonder – how did I miss it? - which, however, was soon dampened when I located and read it. The article, by Syed Ahmad, at the time of the Department of Economics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, boldly titled “Adam Smith’s four invisible hands” (HOPE, 22:1 (137-44).

It discusses the three well-known instances, somewhat inadequately in my view, and achieves the four count by asserting that the reference to ‘an invisible hand’ in Moral Sentiments has two distinct meanings, adding a fourth meaning to the original three. Yes, I agree the claim is close to tentative in the extreme, but, to be fair, if Syed’s reasoning had worked he would have made a major discovery. Unfortunately, it doesn’t and he didn’t.

Syed asserts that the first invisible hand appears in Moral Sentiments in the guise of the “size of the landlord’s stomach” (139). You can read the quotation in full at: TMS IV.ii.10: 184-85. I must ask why does the physical limits of a human stomach – and all other stomachs in nature - need “an invisible hand”?

Syed adds the comment: “Without this limitation ‘all the thousands’ would have perished through his selfishness” (139). But the stomach’s limit is physical, not psychological. Moreover, if the landlords' stomach was without limits, so would every other human’s stomach be without limits too – the problem of starvation would then be exacerbated without limit.

Syed notes correctly that the “selfishness of the landlord is constrained for human survival”, but this has nothing to do with the invisible hand. He also accepts that “it was not man’s prudence or reasonableness or any other mental attitude which prevents catastrophe; it is the physical limitation of his stomach.”

But wait. Syed introduces the ‘second’ invisible hand ‘in the form of the residual selfishness of the landlord”. He notes that the size of the stomach prevents the landlord from ‘eating all the food he has” but “he could still let the rest go to waste” (a view implied by W. D. Grammp (2000. 'What did Adam Smith means by the invisible hand?' Journal of Political Economy, 108: 3, 441-65)in his weird account of the invisible hand). Syed calls this a “positive role” for “selfishness”.

He joins this muddle to Bernard Mandeville’s “Private vices, publick benefits” (“Whilst Luxury/ employ’s a Million of the Poor”). This sidesteps Smith’s concerns with the “thousands whom they employ” on their land producing the acres of food for consumption, before we take up the the issue of the landlord’s consumption of the luxuries supplied by the town’s artisans and producers of foreign imports.

Like the physical limitations of the stomach – an attribute of all humans long before the first landlords appeared from the agricultural ‘revolution’ 8-11,000 years ago – the absolute, inescapable necessity of feeding the labourers (and their families) who prepared the land, sowed the seeds from last season’s harvest, tended the crops (and the farm animals), and harvested and stored the products of the land is fully explainable without an invisible hand metaphor. If the labourers received nothing from a season’s harvest, they would starve and, if it was a general rule across all of society, who would undertake the labourers’ roles in the following spring?

Syed describes the limited stomach’s of the landlords as the first ‘invisible hand’ and the second role of distributing a share of the harvest to the farm labourers, the second invisible hand. Both roles are spurious as examples of an invisible hand explanation. In both examples, the parties to these transactions had no choice but to do what they did; there was no role for an invisible hand to lead them to do what they had to do anyway.

The only meaning that Smith could have meant was the singular role of the landlords in doing what they did as an example of unintentional outcomes, despite their delusions of greatness as the owners of their great estates and the employers of the thousands, who tended their fields and their domestic luxuries, plus, as trade between the country and the town (and foreign towns too) grew, their supply to landlords effective employed the skilled artisans and merchants who supplied luxury items (fine clothes, jewels, gold and silver plate, tapestries, and furniture).

Syed Ahmad did not discover a fourth invisible hand, and the two he elaborated upon in his article were contrived and, therefore, spurious.

Almost Entirely Wrong

One STDV (“Daily, Politically Incorrect Musings on Race, Culture, Intelligence, and Politics”)HERE:(6 August) posts:

“Darwin Takes on Adam Smith's "Invisble Hand" Theory”

“Via Lover of Wisdom comes this article applying Darwin's theory of natural selection to economics. The author contends Adam Smith's "invisible hand" idea doesn't apply in markets where relative success is important.
“Smith is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which holds that when greedy people trade for their own advantage in unfettered private markets, they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the greatest good for all... My prediction is that it will eventually be supplanted by a version of Darwin’s more general narrative...”

“The central theme of Darwin’s narrative was that competition favors traits and behavior according to how they affect the success of individuals, not species or other groups. As in Smith’s account, traits that enhance individual fitness sometimes promote group interests.”

Comment
A mixture of misinformation, myth, and acute observation! In short, he gets Adam Smith mostly wrong and Charles Darwin mostly right.

Adam Smith didn’t have a theory of ‘an invisible hand’. It was a metaphor for people sometimes responding to their perceptions of whatever they considered important that sometimes, but not always, had beneficial outcomes for them and sometimes, but not always, unintentionally had beneficial outcomes for the group (or society).

Smith never opined the view that “when greedy people trade for their own advantage in unfettered private markets, they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the greatest good for all...”.

Smith considered selfish acts as anti-social and ‘licentious’. He never said that ‘they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand’. That is pure tosh. Nor did he think that such behaviour would ‘produce the greatest good for all.’ That is wishful nonsense.

I am relaxed about people being ‘politically incorrect’, but I prefer that people are correct in what they attribute to Adam Smith.

Which Adam Smith Was Wrong?

Shaun Grovers writes the Schlog blog (HERE):

"ADAM SMITH WAS WRONG"

"At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, during the Age of Enlightenment, Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. It’s earned him the title “father of economics” and it greatly influenced the founders of America with its argument that free market capitalism was the best economic system available for a society prone to selfishness.

Adam Smith wasn’t just an economist. In fact, at the time, economics wasn’t its own field yet. The best I can figure it was a branch of philosophy mixed with sociology and even a little religion. Adam Smith, for instance, was a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow - not some mathematician or finance guru working as a prof in a business school. That doesn’t discredit him, of course, but it’s something to keep in mind when reading his thoughts: They’re as much a prescription for morality or theology as they are for business practices.

“Adam Smith believed, for instance, that in order for a free market society to prosper, individuals must look out for their own self interests foremost. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Comment
Smith’s observation was that individuals are ‘self-interested’, an assessment with a long pedigree in classical philosophy long before Smith taught his students. But that was not the problem in itself. The main problem was that people depended upon others, mostly unknown others, for their daily sustenance.

Long gone in Europe were the days when individuals sought whatever they could get for themselves from gathering fruits, roots, insects and birds’ eggs in the forest in ‘rude’ societies that were common before farming and shepherding (and still were common in 18th century experience over much of the world, with a few remnants still found today).

Society was more complex (though fairly simple compared to now) and without mutual dependence, largely from the division of labour and the propensity to exchange, common to all people in Europe, and in the ancient stone civilisations of China and India, the mass of the population would soon suffer grosser privations than was already common. There was not enough subsistence available to support distribution by such benevolence as was present to allow everybody, or a majority, to rely on benevolence for their daily survival. It wasn't that benevolence was wanting so much as it would never feed enough people alone.

Smith addressed the prospects for commercial societies (he didn’t use the word ‘capitalism’ nor have knowledge of the 19th century phenomenon), which if allowed to operate without the oppression of existing state-supported monopolies it would continue the spread of opulence to the majority of the population.

Shaun Grovers jumps into assumptions about what Adam Smith said quite clearly and differently, both in Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth Of Nations (1776). Smith did not have an idealistic view about human behaviour – he was an observer of how people actually behaved and not how they might behave in an imaginary utopia.

Moreover, Smith dealt in relatives, not absolutes. It wasn’t that the ‘butcher, brewer, and baker’ would behave like perfect boy scouts; given the chance – particularly the opportunity provided by monopoly, a common enough condition under the Guild system that had controlled the supply of food and necessaries in most towns since the 16th century – the butcher, brewer, and baker would behave exactly as Shaun concludes in the substance of his article. The trader would pay more than likely “an unjust wage to his workers, lying about the quality and origins of his products, making promises for immediate gain with no intention to keep them, etc,” and much worse besides.

The Smithian antidote to monopoly is competition, not as an idealistic model, but as the best known remedy to selfish behaviours emanating from monopoly.

The Acts of Parliament that created state-granted monopolies, which often fostered private cartels and 'conspiracies' against the consumers, were often orginally awarded with good intentions (and we know to where those roads lead), and had by mid-18th-century Britain become barriers to commercial growth, jobs and good health.

Smith’s critiques of such government interventions was severe (see Book IV of Wealth Of Nations) – so severe that modern readers often generalise incorrectly his specific remarks about 18th-century government interventions as his supposed opposition to all government interventions, which is far from the case, as regularly discussed on Lost Legacy.

Shaun writes:

“Adam Smith, like I said earlier, came up with his ideas during the Age of Enlightenment - a period characterized in part by radical optimism about the human spirit, denying that all men are born spiritually powerless and corrupt. Ronald Reagan sounded a lot like a modern day Adam Smith sometimes. He was very inspiring but very wrong when speaking about the inherent goodness and strength of mankind: “A people free to choose will always choose peace” or “I know in my heart that man is good” or “There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.”

Comment
I do not know where Shaun got these ideas from, but they certainly were never expressed by Adam Smith. This leads me to ask if Shaun has actually read Smith’s works, or is he confined to what others have said that the wrote, plus a few quotations out of context?

“Adam Smith was wrong. Free market capitalism might just be the best economic system the world has ever seen. I assume so, but what do I know about economics? I’m a musician. But it doesn’t produce the rosy results Smith argued it would either. A society full of Smith’s imaginary butchers will not benefit the whole of society because the butcher is not inherently good and self-regulating. He does not naturally pay a living wage to his workers. He does not naturally keep his promises. He does not naturally tell the truth at all times. He’s just like me. And just like you. If we serve ourselves with no outside restraints placed upon us, we’ll cheat to get more and horde what what we get while the distance between us and the have nots widens.”

Comment
Having set up an imaginary straw man and called him ‘Adam Smith’, Shaun concludes that ‘Adam Smith was wrong’. What astonishing insight! Sadly, what nonsense too. It’s not that Shaun is deliberately misleading; he is simply uninformed.

And finally:

“Adam Smith’s error may come from his understanding of God. Adam Smith is believed to have been a deist - someone who thinks “The Great Architect” built the universe but then walked away from it, never to return, never getting mixed up in human affairs, never entering the human heart, never putting on skin and becoming a man for man’s sake, never sending Spirit to guide and teach, never to lead his People to be creators of equality and justice and, well, regulation.”

Comment
Shaun here is interesting. Many make similar interpretations of Smith’s alleged ‘Christianity’ and his alleged providential tendencies, and his alleged Deism, but not as clearly as Shaun does.

However, this would take a lot longer to respond to at this time. I am presently in Denver to read my paper, ‘The Hidden Adam Smith in his Theology’ (in part a response to Lisa Hill’s 2001 paper, ‘The Hidden Theology in Adam Smith’).

Readers interested in the current draft of this paper, which answers in some measure the ideas expressed in the paragraph in his article, should send an email to me: gavin at negWeb dot com.

In sum, Shaun Grovers’ article is interesting but flawed by a reliance on the writings of others (mainly ‘rightwing’ Reagonites it seems who describe a fictional Adam Smith invented in Chicago from the 1950s; though he is not enamoured with the ‘leftwing’ either) and not on the work of the real Adam Smith, born in Kirkcaldy in 1723.

There is a world of difference between these two Adam Smiths, and knowing the differences is important, as well as fairer to the Adam Smith born in Kirkcaldy.

Friends Like Richard Are No Help At All

Richard Bernstein writes in the International Herald Tribune (11 March) HERE:

'Responsible middle' gets no help in crisis’

'So, what's in this for me?" my friend wanted to know. He was asking in good Adam Smith fashion - whose theory was that the common good emerges when everybody works for their own selfish interest - how he could benefit from the current financial crisis.’

Comment
I would advise ‘Zach’ (Richard Bernstein’s friend) not to ask said Richard anything about what’s going on (or not, as the case maybe) in the house-finance markets, because anybody who does not know what Adam Smith’s ‘theory’ (indeed, moral philosophy) was about, and who makes such a ridiculous tabloid hash of it, is not the person to trust on such matters.

Adam Smith never said anything like: ‘the common good emerges when everybody works for their own selfish interest’. And this is not just a quibble.

Smith gives over 50 instances of people working for their ‘own selfish interest’, under the guise of working for their ‘self interests’ (a quite different idea, but that will only confuse Richard), which worked against the ‘common good’ in Books I and II of Wealth Of Nations. Clearly, Smith would not have been so inconsistent as Richard claims him to have been.

In fact, Smith never spoke favourably of selfishness. Richard confuses him with Ayn Rand (1960s) or even Bernard Mandeville (1734). They both lauded selfishness (Rand by making it a virtue and Mandeville by making it a social compulsion – ‘private vice, public benefits’). But not Adam Smith; he called Mandeville's theory 'licentious'.

I’m sorry for Zach having a ‘friend’ like Richard.

Morality and Economics

Lee Randolph writes the Debunking Christianity Blog HERE:

“MORALITY IS ANALOGOUS TO ECONOMICS"

'From what I can see, "morality" is a category of behaviors that result from the self-interest of many agents. It is a form of self-organization of these agents according to their mental capabilities into groups behaving according to implicit rules that will become explicit in humans and has an analogy in economics. Its like circumstances are being guided by an "Invisible Hand". "The Invisible hand" is "an economic principle, first postulated by Adam Smith, holding that the greatest benefit to a society is brought about by individuals acting freely in a competitive marketplace in the pursuit of their own self-interest."
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Answers.com 04 Mar. 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/invisible-hand)

The difference between Self-interest and Selfishness
I see a lot of people make the claim that Adam Smith was endorsing "selfishness". Selfish is to Self-interest as Revenge is to Justice. While similar in concept, one is harmful and the other is not. Selfish and Revenge are about gaining an advantage, Self-interest and Justice are about maintaining an equilibrium.”

Comment
I have no comment on the author’s ‘de-bunking Christianity’ mission.

Mankind has always lived in societies, as our primate ‘cousins’ did and do. Smith’s Moral Sentiments is about the social basis of morality, the primitive origins of which pre-dates Christianity by hundreds of thousands of years, and is older than the earliest beliefs of the earliest religions. While bones fossilise, beliefs don’t.

Early Hominines (the hominids) were born into groups – they didn’t ‘form’ into groups (as far as we can surmise). The speciation from the Common Ancestor 4-6 million years ago (itself a social animal) was from an existing group of primates, some individuals of which speciated separately into chimpanzees, which also live in groups. What changed for the hominine species was the continuation of development manifested in bipedal postures and walking, growing brain-size and development, intense sociability, and changes in the social arrangements for reproduction to accommodate biological changes.

Given that economic aspects of social life pre-dated commercial society I am not clear how analogous moral behaviours are to economics. Lee Randolph cites a statement in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (see link above), which on this evidence is likely to be unreliable: "The Invisible hand" is "an economic principle, first postulated by Adam Smith”.

Readers will know that The Metaphor was not an ‘economic principle’ that was ‘postulated' by Adam Smith. It has become an ‘economic principle’ and was ‘postulated’ by modern economists since the 1950s, and has nothing at all to do with Adam Smith, nor any of the many other 18th -century authors who used the same metaphor in their literary works.

However, I think Lee Randolph is quite right when the identifies the differences between selfishness and self interest when he writes: ‘Selfish[ness] and Revenge are about gaining an advantage, Self-interest and Justice are about maintaining an equilibrium.’

Hollywood 'John Nash' Was Wrong

Hwee Ling writes a most interesting Blog, The Learning Economist (HERE):

“Is Economics a "Science"?

The scientific approach involves the 4 following steps:
1. Observation
2. Reasoning
3. Formulation of Theory
4. Testing
In the movie "A Beautiful Mind", you can see part of this scientific approach in use: The scene is set in a bar in which John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) rebutted Adam Smith's idea that, 'the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself'. Adam Smith had said: "In competition, individual ambition serves the common good."

But John Nash took an opposing view.

In the movie, he observed what was going on in the bar, in which it was clear that all his friends had the same idea.. to go straight for a pretty blond girl who had just walked into the place with her other pretty (but not quite as pretty) friends. He related to his friends how they could all score if they all didn't go for the blonde but for her friends instead... He told them that, 'the best result will come where everyone in the group does what is best for himself ... and the group.' He envisioned a scenario -- a bargaining strategy -- in which nobody loses.. Watch how the idea (which was later developed into a theory) was conceived after he carefully observed the scene...

In case you missed the dialogue, here's the transcript:

Nash : Adam Smith needs revision.

Hansen : What are you talking about?

Nash : If we all go for the blonde...we block each other. Not a single one of us is gonna get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. Well, what if no one goes for the blonde?
We don't get in each other's way, and we don't insult the other girls.
That's the only way we win.
(Laughs)
Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right? That's what he said, right?

Others : Right.

Nash : Incomplete.
Incomplete, okay?
Because the best result will come...from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself...and the group.

Hansen : Nash, if this is some way for you to get the blonde on your own, you can go to hell.

Nash: Governing dynamics gentlemen. Governing dynamics. Adam Smith...was wrong.”

Nash leaves the bar.

Comment
I have commented several times on Lost Legacy on this scenario from the film, Beautiful Mind, and the above words written by Hollywood script writers, whose authority for attributing ideas to Adam Smith is an unknown variable, though it is unlikely to be accurate if influenced by the existing consensus of US academe with its, frankly, appalling record of misunderstanding, misattribution, and mistaken presentation in many matters relating to the philosophy and political economy of Adam Smith.

I have no objections whatsoever if the above scenario is presented as a strategic Prisoner’s Dilemma problem using a casual dating game as its subject, which, plausibly, is replicated in bars and clubs across the land. My objection is to the imagined scenario being associated with Adam Smith’s assertions about individual self-interest and group behaviour.

The lesson of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, either in its original form of a ‘red-black’ [NB. The convention later became a red-blue choice] 100-round game, or as the well-known choices of confessing or not confessing offered separately to two prisoner’s suspected of a major crime, is that acting for what is best for self (confess to go free – as long as the other prisoner does not confess) or acting for what is best for both of them (both of them not confessing), is that always acting for self, or always playing red, leads to long jail sentences or high negative scores, whereas doing what is best for both of them (both don’t confess; both play black), as long as they both choose leads to short sentences and high positive scores.

This was precisely what Adam Smith recommended through the venerable and ancient ‘propensity to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’, or bargaining: ‘give that which I want, and you shall have this which you want’.

To settle a bargain, the players should consider that which is best for both of them; competing in a bargain to get the best deal for self, generally means that they don’t get a deal; they deadlock, fail to agree, and go their separate ways in disappointment.

In the bar scene, all the boys have the same choice; pick separate ‘targets’ and go for their favoured girl. (Unsaid, of course, the girls had the same choice of picking one boy; the male script writers typicaly took a chauvinistic view of the scenario.) As everybody is a stranger, it doesn’t really matter which you pick; you’re not making a life-time choice!

The real lesson of Prisoner Dilemma games is quite interesting (I have used them thousands of times in Business School negotiating courses since the 1970s) is that in the overwhelming majority of cases (92 per cent, when I used to keep scores for analysis) the outcomes were sub-optimal, that is negative red-blue scores, translating in Prisoner’s Dilemma games to maximum long jail sentences. Only 8 per cent of pairs scored maximum blue points (48 each).

Other researchers (John Carlyle, for instance) reported slightly better results of 87 per cent and 17 per cent respectively, but while I can be sure that my pre-game briefings were the same each time, and no hints were given by me, it may be that John’s pre-briefing of the game was not devoid of ‘hints’, which would account for the slightly different outcomes.

In short, Adam Smith was correct. People who act without addressing the self-interests of the other party do much worse than those who do (See WN I.iii.2: p 26-7).

It may be that John Nash understood the better outcome of the co-operative choice as well as Adam Smith did - people bargaining are not competitors; they are co-operators; they do best for themselves by serving the interests of the other guy – or gal – too.

Bargaining exchanges that conclude successfully are co-operative outcomes; both do best by serving each other’s interests consistent with the best available outcome for themselves.

This propensity among humankind was of early vintage in the history and pre-history of humanity (see my Pre-History of Bargaining: a multi-disciplinary treatment, Part I’, downloadable from Lost Legacy’s Home Page). It’s in chapter 2 of Wealth Of Nations. The 'Beautiful Mind' scriptwriters are wrong about Adam Smith (John Nash may well have been innocent).

Incidentally, if only I had read Wealth Of Nations before I was 20:

when I was a teenager going to weekly dances (jiving, etc.,) I had a friend who demonstrated his dating technique, which was to dance with girls who were ‘wallflowers’, rather than ‘popular’ girls. He claimed he always got a ‘certain’ date that way, while most of us ended up walking home alone …

Congratulations to Hwee Ling for writing a most interesting Blog for students.

Adam Smith On Selfishness and Public Spirit

Roland Patrick lets go on Let’s Fly Under the Bridge HERE: with at The Kansan (Thomas Frank: author of ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’) with “What's the Matter with Frank?” in a warm debate between them both on the ‘crumbling US infrastructure’ (roads, bridges, and highways).

Roland Patrick states in his piece:

“Well over two centuries ago Adam Smith explained, in Wealth of Nations, how the public got what they needed, and it wasn't usually through 'public service'. It was by appealing to the selfish interests of producers of food, clothing and shelter. i.e., by offering money in return.”

Comment
If your are going to quote from Adam Smith (or, indeed, anybody) you ought to get the quotation correct. Slipping in the word ‘selfish’ before interests is, er, naughty. There is quite a lot of difference between ‘self interest’ and ‘selfish interest’.

You may be selfish as your fancy takes you, but that’s no way to engaged with other people. Selfishness begets selfishness. But in exchange transactions, especially when bargaining for something, Adam Smith made it clear exactly what is involved:

‘But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.’ (WN I.ii.2: p 26-7)

You get what you need, not be being selfish but by interesting their [NOT your] self-love in his [NOT your] favour, and show them that it is for their [NOT your] own advantage to do for him [You] what he [You] requires of them [Him].

It’s a two-way, not a one-way, street. It’s his self-interest you address, not your own. And you do this by using a conditional proposition, ‘If you..Then I’:

“Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want”

The important element of bargaining is to convince the other party how and why she benefits from the transaction. You have to be ‘other-centred’, not selfishly self-centred.

Nobody selling you a television would be successful if he told you that you should buy because he, the seller, will be able to afford a new car. The buyer wants to hear what benefits she gets from the deal, not what the seller gets, and the seller should tell her why it is beneficial to her not him for her to agree a purchase.

I am amazed how so many people, supposedly living in the most capitalist market place in the world, never seem to think about the numerous buying and selling transactions they must get involved in and how and why some went better than others. Even supposedly well-trained sales people remain ignorant of the basic principle of sales – link your product to the needs of the buyer, not your needs as a seller.

Adam Smith never recommended selfishness – in fact he criticises selfishness in his earlier book, Moral Sentiments, and repeats his anti-selfish message in the passage quoted above from Wealth Of Nations. And, by the way, contrary to common perceptions, Smith also had some positive things to say about ‘publicly-spirited men’:

“The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare. When a patriot exerts himself for the improvement of any part of the public police, his conduct does not always arise from pure sympathy with the happiness of those who are to reap the benefit of it. It is not commonly from a fellow-feeling with carriers and waggoners that a public-spirited man encourages the mending of high roads. When the legislature establishes premiums and other encouragements to advance the linen or woollen manufactures, its conduct seldom proceeds from pure sympathy with the wearer of cheap or fine cloth, and much less from that with the manufacturer or merchant. The perfection of police, the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects. The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. All constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.

From a certain spirit of system, however, from a certain love of art and contrivance, we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy. There have been men of the greatest public spirit, who have shown themselves in other respects not very sensible to the feelings of humanity. And on the contrary, there have been men of the greatest humanity, who seem to have been entirely devoid of public spirit. Every man may find in the circle of his acquaintance instances both of the one kind and the other. ….
In the same manner, if you would implant public virtue in the breast of him who seems heedless of the interest of his country, it will often be to no purpose to tell him, what superior advantages the subjects of a well-governed state enjoy; that they are better lodged, that they are better clothed, that they are better fed. These considerations will commonly make no great impression. You will be more likely to persuade, if you describe the great system of public police which procures these advantages, if you explain the connexions and dependencies of its several parts, their mutual subordination to one another, and their general subserviency to the happiness of the society; if you show how this system might be introduced into his own country, what it is that hinders it from taking place there at present, how those obstructions might be removed, and all the several wheels of the machine of government be made to move with more harmony and smoothness, without grating upon one another, or mutually retarding one another's motions. It is scarce possible that a man should listen to a discourse of this kind, and not feel himself animated to some degree of public spirit. He will, at least for the moment, feel some desire to remove those obstructions, and to put into motion so beautiful and so orderly a machine. Nothing tends so much to promote public spirit as the study of politics, of the several systems of civil government, their advantages and disadvantages, of the constitution of our own country, its situation, and interest with regard to foreign nations, its commerce, its defence, the disadvantages it labours under, the dangers to which it may be exposed, how to remove the one, and how to guard against the other. Upon this account political disquisitions, if just, and reasonable, and practicable, are of all the works of speculation the most useful. Even the weakest and the worst of them are not altogether without their utility. They serve at least to animate the public passions of men, and rouse them to seek out the means of promoting the happiness of the society.” (TMS IV.i.11: pp185-6)

This suggests to me that Adam Smith saw some advantages in certain public acts by men of ‘public spirit’ through their drive and enthusiasm for making where they reside a better place than living with a ‘crumbling infrastructure’ and accepting the failings of governments – not markets – with a helplessness born of unsocial and inhumanity for those who have to accept it because they know of no other way of life.

People accept rubbish strewn streets, they are resigned to them; yet the same people could be mobilized by enthusiasm to start cleaning it up and keeping it clean.

In Smith’s time this civic duty was called ‘police’ (not the law and order kind - a later emaning - but cleaning up the streets), and a place was judged clean by the absence of rubbish and sewerage in its streets. Edinburgh’s Old Town was a filthy mess for many years, until some public spirited citizens demanded that the City Officers kept clean what the local people had cleaned up.

More on Foley's Folly

In a review Adam’s Fallacy by Duncan K. Foley (2006) on the Mediated Blog HERE: This comment caught my attention:

“The ‘fallacy’ as Foley describes it, is as follows: “Smith asserts the apparently self-contradictory notion that capitalism transforms selfishness into its opposite: regard and service for others.”

To which I posted this comment:

Adam Smith did not confuse self-interest with selfishness. He was a moral philosopher and not one given to sloppy thinking; his criticism of selfishness as a behaviour is set out in his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), particularly his specific critique of the ‘licentious’ views of Bernard Mandeville (‘Private Vice, Public Virtue’, 1724), which many modern commentators confuse with Adam Smith’s.

In Wealth Of Nations, 1776, he explains that self interest in a commercial economy (he never used the word ‘capitalism’ – it was not invented in English until 1854) where everybody is dependent on the services of thousands of others for their ‘necessities, conveniences, and amusements of life’, requires them not to think only of their own self interest, but to address the self interest of others, i.e., to be ‘other’ not ‘self’, centred by mediating their mutual self interests.

Unless they do this they may go hungry – there not being enough resources to make relying on benevolence, or stealing, reliable behaviours for everyday civilised life.

Thus, people receive the means for their dinner, and much else besides, by offering others their daily bargains:

“He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.’ (Wealth Of Nations, II.ii.2: p 26).

For this fundamental misunderstanding of Adam Smith by Duncan Foley, a distinguished historian of economics (I have heard him lecture), I described his 2006 book in a review as ‘Foley’s Folly’.

Smith Knew the Differences Between Self Interest and Selfishness

There is much in the media at present that attempts to draw easy conclusions about the causes of the current financial crises, often of a kind that finds the sins of commission in the commercial market system and the virtues of omission in the state sector.

Hardly, a day goes by when we are not lectured on the ‘end of market capitalism’ and its replacement by what amounts to state capitalism. Fair enough, it’s a free country in this constitutional monarchy and in the largest capitalist market economy, the United States of America.

However, the constant drum beat of nonsense about self interest as taught by Adam Smith, frankly is tiresome because it is so untrue that he didn’t know the difference or, worse, ‘changed his mind’ in Wealth Of Nations, that I think it worthwhile to note something he wrote in Moral Sentiments in a discourse on the effects of a supposed earthquake ‘the great empire of China’ and how a ‘man of humanity' might react to an event, then about two years return distance away by sailing ship.

I have quoted the first part of the discussion several times on Lost Legacy, mainly, perhaps in vain, to correct scribblers who draw the absolutely wrong conclusions from it, namely they calim that even a man of humanity would prefer to save his little finger, of immediate, close and personal interest to himself, rather than save the ‘ruin of a 100 millions of his brethren’. Many quote this thought experiment of Smith as if he concludes the triumph of the ‘man of humanity’s’ sselfish elf-interest over millions of earthquake victims.

They are totally wrong. They should have read on:

“When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves. It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.” [TMS III.3.5: p 137)

Comment
If that is not a final and devastating rebuttal of the ‘selfish greed’ libel against Adam Smith, I don’t know what he could have written in its place.

'Geko’s', ‘greed is good’, outburst slipped in for dramatic affect of a Hollywood script writer did not come from anything that Smith wrote. They expose their ignorance those who claim he did.

They confuse Bernard Mandeville’s satire of [1705-1732] 1924, 'Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits’, (Oxford University Press) with Smith’s writings from 1744 to 1790 (Mandeville died in 1733; Smith was 10). Now, of course, Smith knew of Mandeville’s writings; he described them as ‘licentious’ in Moral Sentiments (TMS VII.4: pp 306-14).

The piece quoted above from Moral Sentiments is clear and unequivocal.

Self Interest and Selfishness

Simon Caulkin, management editor, writes in The Observer (UK), 16 November, HERE:

“Guess what? Self-interest is bad for the economy”

“Self-interest as the driver that, like an invisible hand, permits individuals acting on their own behalf to benefit society as a whole goes back to Adam Smith. But Smith at least realised the drastic inequities it would cause and proposed measures, including progressive taxes, to mitigate the worst effects. No such caution has been in evidence since the 1960s as the concept has become the central belief around which all Anglo-American corporate governance, and thence management as a whole, revolves.

“Not so in economics, whose central tenets - rational agents, the invisible hand, efficient markets - derive from economic work done in the 1950s and 1960s, 'which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science. In reality, markets are not efficient, humans tend to be over-focused on the short term and blind in the long term, and errors get multiplied, ultimately leading to collective irrationality, panic and crashes. Free markets are wild markets' - for which classical economics has no framework of understanding.

“It's an error to think that management, or even economics, can ever be a 'hard' science, not least because of their self-fulfilling premises. That doesn't mean they are unworthy of study and understanding. On the contrary. But, as Greenspan sorrowfully acknowledges, the first step on that path is to bow to empirical observation and stop trying to prove the Earth is the centre of the universe.

Comment
Simon Caulkin confuses self interest universally benefiting everyone unintentionally, as an idea of Adam Smith’s (he asserts that the idea ‘goes back’ to him), when in fact Smith gave an instance of this happening when merchants preferred to invest their capital locally rather than send it abroad (Wealth Of Nations IV.ii.9: p456).

He also said this happened in many other instances, but he did not say this was a universal consequence of all individuals pursuing their self interest, ‘enlightened’ or otherwise.

Smith had a fine sense of history and he knew the difference between self interest and selfishness. In fact, he gives over 70 other instances in the Books I, II, and III of Wealth Of Nations where individuals exercising their the self interest had consequences that were anything but beneficial to society as a whole.

The merchants above were activated by their risk avoidance; they didn’t need an invisible hand to lead them to avert avoid adding to their risks. Smith used the metaphor as a literary device, not as an instrument of social behaviour.

The belief that there were invisible hands ensuring that thereby anything done by corporate bodies benefits society was “more like propaganda against communism than plausible science” is half right, though ‘communism’ was not the target; it was more positive than that. It was propaganda, alright, but not just by corporate-minded economists in favour of their clients being given a free hand to do whatever they wanted; it was also, and mainly, an attempt by mainstream economists to legitimise their mathematical models of general equilibrium.