Adam Smith
Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction
Even such a key figure as Adam Smith believed that we would reach economic fulfilment before turning to the ‘real problems’ of nature and human life
What would Adam Smith make of the AI revolution?
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith’s seminal text in the history…
What a slippery, hateful toad Fred Goodwin was
Make It Happen is a portrait of a bullying control freak, Fred Goodwin, who turned RBS into the largest bank…
Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination
The balance of power between humans and machines
Robert Skidelsky dismisses the possibility of our annihilation by a superintelligent computer system, since ‘science tells us that we cannot create such a being’. But does it?
Who deserves a free lunch?
It is a tenet of neo-liberal economics that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This is obvious…
Adam Smith would have approved of Trump’s trade tariffs
‘What the hell is going on?’ That anxious wail of economic incomprehension has been heard ever since President Trump decided…
Lashing out in all directions
Trump denounces Muslims, Mexicans… and millionaires
The other side to the division of labour: the concentration of attention
Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labour first appeared in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. The idea was…
Diary
To the dentist. And for an extraction. I hadn’t had a tooth out in decades. But the twinges when I…
Muck and brass
The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern…
Adam Smith vs the measurebators
Gandhi would test his resolve by sleeping between two naked virgins, an avenue not really open to me, as my…
The luckiest kids in history
The statistics speak for themselves. Today’s gilded generation is the most blessed that ever lived
The great land grab
The highly profitable — and intrinsically selfish — system of land ownership that replaced medieval feudal tenure had profound moral consequences that continue to this day, says John Adamson
The right way
We need conservatism now more than ever
