Age of Reason

After Collected Poems by Derek Walcott I’m taking a slight hiatus to read something I’ve wanted to since hearing a Freakanomics podcast. Adam Smith’s dual work “Wealth of Nations” and “Theory of Moral Sentiments” are some of the stand out texts from the enlightenment age. Given all the political morass we find in our country I wanted to explore some of the founding values and to do that you have to go back to the enlightenment.

Adam Smith has continued to have an outsized influence on our politics, with people typically quoting “Wealth of Nations” to justify an economic policy but as the podcast discussed the “Moral Sentiments” writing explores how governments should be executing policies for the people’s well-being.

There are plenty of places to focus the economic efforts. The people are at the center of any decision.

So far in “Wealth of Nations” every single tidbit of economic knowledge I have has been discussed. Capital, profits, wages, etc. Without saying inflation he circles the concept pretty heavily at the beginning but a lot of that discussion is based on metal-backed currencies, which we dropped and are now free floating which he will not get into (I believe).

The interesting notions are that you can see the links between economic decisions that should be made by governments to impact people for their benefit as opposed to the discussions we have today of making policy to improve the economy as a whole. When did the economy replace the people?

Plenty of other people have discussed things like maximizing happiness or governments shouldn’t just focus on GDP so I won’t get into that but if we want to settle our differences today, finding our common values is key. Most of those values are found in the enlightenment thinkers and they recognize that benefiting one’s people and their livelihoods are the metrics we should track.