[Salon] Lecture by Prof. Jacob Soll: Why Everything You Ever Learned about Adam Smith Is Wrong and What It Means for Capitalism

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Subject: [Salon] Lecture by Prof. Jacob Soll: Why Everything You Ever Learned about Adam Smith Is Wrong and What It Means for Capitalism

From: "Peter Beattie (SSC)" <pbeattie@cuhk.edu.hk>

Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2023 05:38:39 +0000

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Thread-topic: Lecture by Prof. Jacob Soll: Why Everything You Ever Learned about Adam Smith Is Wrong and What It Means for Capitalism

As promised, here’s the recording of the lecture Prof. Jacob Soll gave at CUHK a few months ago, finally uploaded with subtitles. My disagreement with Warren on economic matters seems to pale in significance with my agreement with him on foreign policy, but regardless, this is a fascinating and worthwhile topic to explore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqFHiHJaKRA

Date: 20 September 2023 Title: Why Everything You Ever Learned About Adam Smith is Wrong and What it Means for Capitalism Speaker: Prof. Jacob Soll (University Professor and Professor of Philosophy, History and Accounting, University of Southern California (USC))

Abstract: In the most popular economics textbooks used today, Adam Smith is portrayed as the father of free market economics, an early proponent of modern capitalism. But what if this is entirely inaccurate, a myth developed to serve the purposes of an economic ideology emerging much later? Bringing a historian’s methodology to shed light on the question, Prof Soll dispels the myth of Adam Smith’s role in the history of economic thought, and offers a revealing account of the history of “free market” economics from a traditional view that free markets could only exist if strong and moral governments liberated society from a selfish, rent seeking economic elite through intervention, to the contemporary view that free markets can only exist with small, non-intrusive governments limited to a “night watchman” function. That this argument is not merely a matter of academic, historical interest is revealed by the vitriol and controversy it has recently generated in the United States. The history of “free market” thinking is of profound relevance today, as it lies at the root of problems from the ecological crisis to US-China relations.

Peter Beattie

Assistant Professor; Assistant Programme Director, MSSc in Global Political Economy

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

+852 3943 9794

www.beatt.ie

Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy:

The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030028008

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