Lynne Kiesling Adam Smith’s “man of system” is one of my favorite metaphors for a policymaker who is so taken with imposing his vision of society that he treats the individuals in it like pieces on a chessboard, ignoring the fact that each one of them has his or her own principles, values, and autonomy …
Friday Afternoon Video: Adam Smith’s Man of System Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I can always tell when I’m giving a midterm exam in my History of Economic Thought course; my old post on Adam Smith and the “man of system” starts showing up with more hits! Given the nature of public policy, politics, and regulation right now, and the fact that I see the “man …
Lynne Kiesling I spent last week attending Liberty Fund’s annual Adam Smith conference, as one of the two discussion leaders. It was a total blast. But it’s hard to summarize, or to draw out some of the more salient new knowledge that came out of it. We had a very interdisciplinary crowd, replete with philosophers, …
Recently on EconTalk Russ Roberts talked with Duke University’s Mike Munger about permissionless innovation. The discussion focused on Mike’s recent essay on permissionless innovation, in which he claimed that “permissionless innovation, a strong presumption in favor of allowing experimentation with new technologies and with new business platforms that use those technologies” is the most important, …
Complexity, Permissionless Innovation, and the English Dance Read More »
Lynne Kiesling This week’s Economist has an article that points out what many US residents, and readers of this blog, know full well: But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a …
Lynne Kiesling I am on a plane all day today, flying to England for a few days of holiday before proceeding to Stockholm for the Mont Pelerin Society annual meeting. My main activity for the flight is to work on my course prep for my new freshman seminar this fall, entitled “Adam Smith and the …
Lynne Kiesling In the post-election show of sleeve-rolling-up meeting between Barack Obama and John McCain, their main rhetoric revolved around how they could work together to “fix up the economy”. At the time I wrote about how that language rankled me (and Russ Roberts), because the economy is not a closed-system project, and politicians who …
“Fixing” the Economy: How Do You “Fix” an Ecosystem? Read More »
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