Did He or Didn’t He? (He Did!)
Prof. Gavin Kennedy, of Heriot-Watt University (emeritus) and Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, has called my attention, indirectly, and Paul Walker, of Anti-dismal, directly, to an error in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. On page 40 of that book, I assert that Adam Smith never visited a pin factory. The full paragraph reads this way:
That Smith relied on secondary sources to some extent for his discussion of the pin factory is well established. His authority for the eighteen distinct pin-making operations apparently was the entry in the 1755 Encyclopédie of d’Amlembert and Diderot, whose seven volumes he bought for the Glasgow University Library before June of 1760. W.B. Todd, textual editor of the Oxford University Press edition Wealth of Nations, mentions in a footnote that a passage “very similar” to the one that eventually appeared in The Wealth of Nations is to be found in an early draft of the book, composed before April 1763 – before, that is, Smith traveled to France with the Duke of Buccleuch.
In that draft, Smith conjectured that “where the processes of manufacture are divided among 18 persons, each should in effect be capable of producing 2,000 pins in a day,” or 36,000 pins (according to the footnote on p. 15 of my facsimile of the 1976 Oxford edition.) The same numbers are employed in the two versions of the Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1762-3 and 1766, he says.
So where did Smith visit his “small manufactory,” and when? What accounts for the discrepancy in numbers? – 18 men making 36,000 pins a day in the early accounts, apparently hypothetically, to judge from his grammatical construction; 10 men making 48,000 pins a day in the later, eyewitness version, published in 1776. In an earlier post, Prof. Kennedy wrote:
Whether my error is serious or trivial depends on the business you are in. It is, I suppose, a calumny on Smith to say that he never saw to a pin factory, even if in the same breath I gave him credit for getting out and around. Certainly I deeply regret the error. It is still the case that Kindleberger was correct in the essay that made such an impression on me: Smith failed to report a lot of stuff that was going on right under his nose. The great figures of the early Industrial Revolution – Wedgewood, Arkwright, Boulton and Watt – are mostly missing from The Wealth of Nations. But does that demonstrate that Smith was ignorant of the industrial revolution that was going on around him? I don’t think so.
There are many paths to discovery in economics: experimental, mathematical (and statistical), empirical, historical. Practitioners routinely make exaggerated claims for the primacy of each. The point I sought to make in my book – its subtitle was A Story of Economic Discovery – was that the most important insights have derived from some combination of theoretical coherence checked against observations of the real world. That’s the portrait of Smith I sought to convey – gregarious and curious one moment, prone to long silences the next, time he spent not reading or poking his nose into factories, but rather “thinking, thinking, tracing through the long chains of causation.” When these were finally described in The Wealth of Nations, they produced a model, an “imaginary machine,” that convinced a substantial community of thinkers to stop writing as philosophers and begin behaving like scientists.
But I digress.
January 20, 2008 @ 4:36 pm · Filed under Author's Postings
Prof. Gavin Kennedy, of Heriot-Watt University (emeritus) and Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, has called my attention, indirectly, and Paul Walker, of Anti-dismal, directly, to an error in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. On page 40 of that book, I assert that Adam Smith never visited a pin factory. The full paragraph reads this way:
That Smith relied on secondary sources to some extent for his discussion of the pin factory is well established. His authority for the eighteen distinct pin-making operations apparently was the entry in the 1755 Encyclopédie of d’Amlembert and Diderot, whose seven volumes he bought for the Glasgow University Library before June of 1760. W.B. Todd, textual editor of the Oxford University Press edition Wealth of Nations, mentions in a footnote that a passage “very similar” to the one that eventually appeared in The Wealth of Nations is to be found in an early draft of the book, composed before April 1763 – before, that is, Smith traveled to France with the Duke of Buccleuch.
In that draft, Smith conjectured that “where the processes of manufacture are divided among 18 persons, each should in effect be capable of producing 2,000 pins in a day,” or 36,000 pins (according to the footnote on p. 15 of my facsimile of the 1976 Oxford edition.) The same numbers are employed in the two versions of the Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1762-3 and 1766, he says.
So where did Smith visit his “small manufactory,” and when? What accounts for the discrepancy in numbers? – 18 men making 36,000 pins a day in the early accounts, apparently hypothetically, to judge from his grammatical construction; 10 men making 48,000 pins a day in the later, eyewitness version, published in 1776. In an earlier post, Prof. Kennedy wrote:
Whether my error is serious or trivial depends on the business you are in. It is, I suppose, a calumny on Smith to say that he never saw to a pin factory, even if in the same breath I gave him credit for getting out and around. Certainly I deeply regret the error. It is still the case that Kindleberger was correct in the essay that made such an impression on me: Smith failed to report a lot of stuff that was going on right under his nose. The great figures of the early Industrial Revolution – Wedgewood, Arkwright, Boulton and Watt – are mostly missing from The Wealth of Nations. But does that demonstrate that Smith was ignorant of the industrial revolution that was going on around him? I don’t think so.
There are many paths to discovery in economics: experimental, mathematical (and statistical), empirical, historical. Practitioners routinely make exaggerated claims for the primacy of each. The point I sought to make in my book – its subtitle was A Story of Economic Discovery – was that the most important insights have derived from some combination of theoretical coherence checked against observations of the real world. That’s the portrait of Smith I sought to convey – gregarious and curious one moment, prone to long silences the next, time he spent not reading or poking his nose into factories, but rather “thinking, thinking, tracing through the long chains of causation.” When these were finally described in The Wealth of Nations, they produced a model, an “imaginary machine,” that convinced a substantial community of thinkers to stop writing as philosophers and begin behaving like scientists.
But I digress.
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A Guide to Further Reading
Knowledge Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations appeared in 2006 without a bibliography,rendering it more suitable to airplane reading than classroom use. That is not such a bad thing for a book about technical economics. (The British Wallpaper guidebook series breveted it “best long-haul read” last year.) But the fact is that Knowledge has many potential classroom uses.
On the jump, please find a guide to further reading in the rapidly developing literature of growth economics:
__(‘Read the rest of this entry »’)
August 22, 2007 @ 1:06 pm · Filed under Author's Postings
Knowledge Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations appeared in 2006 without a bibliography,rendering it more suitable to airplane reading than classroom use. That is not such a bad thing for a book about technical economics. (The British Wallpaper guidebook series breveted it “best long-haul read” last year.) But the fact is that Knowledge has many potential classroom uses.
On the jump, please find a guide to further reading in the rapidly developing literature of growth economics:
__(‘Read the rest of this entry »’)
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Back in Business
One of the problems of writing Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations had to do with deciding how to deal with the many realms in which parallel discussions had gone forward about the same time. What to say about the related work in international trade? In industrial organization? In growth accounting? In economic history? In the law schools? The business schools? Consulting firms? The Society for the History of Technology? The History of Science Society?
How central to understanding what had happened was the argument over the significance of the QWERTY keyboard? How important for the reception of the new work were the subtle antipathies toward of Chicago, London, and Cambridge, Mass? What significance attached to the rival achievements and competing claims on our attention of Peter Drucker and Michael Porter? Of Jane Jacobs and Manuel Castells? Of John Kenneth Galbraith and F.M. Scherer? Of Janos Kornai and Peter Albin? Of Jonathan Hughes and Thomas Hughes? Of Daniel Bell and Alfred Chandler? Of Brian Arthur and Nicholas Negroponte? Of Dale Jorgenson and Zvi Griliches? Of Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter? Of Julian Simon and Peter Bauer? Of Mancur Olson and Edward Prescott? Of William Ethier and Xiaokai Yang? Of Karl Shell and William Nordhaus? Of Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt? Of Nathan Rosenberg and Joel Mokyr? Of Douglass North and Ronald Coase? Of Richard Easterlin and Ester Boserup? Of William Baumol and Edmund Phelps? Not to mention Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell, those bold “supply-siders” who argued that cutting taxes would automatically lead to faster growth?
For the most part, I solved these problems by ignoring them, in order to concentrate on the adventure of high economics. As I saw it, the really interesting story was one about mathematical (or formal) reasoning and natural language. As a graduate student in the 1980s, Paul Romer had approached the problem of economic growth straightforwardly, seeking to account for the ubiquity of falling costs. In the end, the equations that Rome wrote took a fundamental new distinction, between rival and nonrival goods, and placed it at the center of economics, with far-reaching implications for policy. This was, as I saw it, the main line of advance.
In his Principles of Psychology, there is a terrific chapter (XXI – “The Perception of Reality”) in which the philosopher William James divides the world into various “sub-universes”of meaning – the world of sense, of physical things; the world of science, as conceived by the expert; the world of abstract truths, of ethical, aesthetic, metaphysical and mathematical propositions; the world of “idols of the tribe,” of prejudices and illusions common to the community; the supernatural worlds of various religions; the worlds of individual opinion, “as numerous as men are”; and the worlds of sheer madness and vagary. Everything that is could be assigned to one world or the other, wrote James. “The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing with one of them forgets, for the time being, its relations to the rest.” The task of the philosopher is to determine the relation of each sub-world to the rest.
Journalism is one way of bringing into register multiple realities within the various sub-universes of everyday life. Prizes are another. Still another is collision between law and economics. There is always philosophy. The last words, of course, in each succeeding generation, belong to the historians.
March 20, 2007 @ 4:22 pm · Filed under Author's Postings
One of the problems of writing Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations had to do with deciding how to deal with the many realms in which parallel discussions had gone forward about the same time. What to say about the related work in international trade? In industrial organization? In growth accounting? In economic history? In the law schools? The business schools? Consulting firms? The Society for the History of Technology? The History of Science Society?
How central to understanding what had happened was the argument over the significance of the QWERTY keyboard? How important for the reception of the new work were the subtle antipathies toward of Chicago, London, and Cambridge, Mass? What significance attached to the rival achievements and competing claims on our attention of Peter Drucker and Michael Porter? Of Jane Jacobs and Manuel Castells? Of John Kenneth Galbraith and F.M. Scherer? Of Janos Kornai and Peter Albin? Of Jonathan Hughes and Thomas Hughes? Of Daniel Bell and Alfred Chandler? Of Brian Arthur and Nicholas Negroponte? Of Dale Jorgenson and Zvi Griliches? Of Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter? Of Julian Simon and Peter Bauer? Of Mancur Olson and Edward Prescott? Of William Ethier and Xiaokai Yang? Of Karl Shell and William Nordhaus? Of Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt? Of Nathan Rosenberg and Joel Mokyr? Of Douglass North and Ronald Coase? Of Richard Easterlin and Ester Boserup? Of William Baumol and Edmund Phelps? Not to mention Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell, those bold “supply-siders” who argued that cutting taxes would automatically lead to faster growth?
For the most part, I solved these problems by ignoring them, in order to concentrate on the adventure of high economics. As I saw it, the really interesting story was one about mathematical (or formal) reasoning and natural language. As a graduate student in the 1980s, Paul Romer had approached the problem of economic growth straightforwardly, seeking to account for the ubiquity of falling costs. In the end, the equations that Rome wrote took a fundamental new distinction, between rival and nonrival goods, and placed it at the center of economics, with far-reaching implications for policy. This was, as I saw it, the main line of advance.
In his Principles of Psychology, there is a terrific chapter (XXI – “The Perception of Reality”) in which the philosopher William James divides the world into various “sub-universes”of meaning – the world of sense, of physical things; the world of science, as conceived by the expert; the world of abstract truths, of ethical, aesthetic, metaphysical and mathematical propositions; the world of “idols of the tribe,” of prejudices and illusions common to the community; the supernatural worlds of various religions; the worlds of individual opinion, “as numerous as men are”; and the worlds of sheer madness and vagary. Everything that is could be assigned to one world or the other, wrote James. “The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing with one of them forgets, for the time being, its relations to the rest.” The task of the philosopher is to determine the relation of each sub-world to the rest.
Journalism is one way of bringing into register multiple realities within the various sub-universes of everyday life. Prizes are another. Still another is collision between law and economics. There is always philosophy. The last words, of course, in each succeeding generation, belong to the historians.
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Mutual Forgiveness vs. The Merciful Padding of Blather
This page was created to make some sort of response to the reception of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, enlarging and elaborating mostly, annotating occasionally. To those who formed the expectation that its discourse would be incessant, or even regular, I apologize. I’ve have been traveling, visiting, working in other realms.
Mostly, however, I’ve been discovering how fundamentally antithetical is the world of the blog to the ethos of writing for publication. This disjunction was described supremely well by the novelist John Updike in a little essay that appeared yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, adapted from an earlier speech to booksellers.
The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant “Aw, shucks,” disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness.
Books have edges, Updike says. In the “electronic anthill,” there are no edges That’s the problem, all right. Now that I have become clear about it in my own mind, perhaps I can return to writing periodically on this page, more in the spirit of mutual forgiveness, one hopes, than blather
June 26, 2006 @ 12:50 pm · Filed under Author's Postings
This page was created to make some sort of response to the reception of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, enlarging and elaborating mostly, annotating occasionally. To those who formed the expectation that its discourse would be incessant, or even regular, I apologize. I’ve have been traveling, visiting, working in other realms.
Mostly, however, I’ve been discovering how fundamentally antithetical is the world of the blog to the ethos of writing for publication. This disjunction was described supremely well by the novelist John Updike in a little essay that appeared yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, adapted from an earlier speech to booksellers.
The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant