2.4 Adam Smith: Economic Illusions
Last modified 07/04/2008
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Just to connect our series here with others on this issue: The resemblance of
Darwin's theory, with clear influence emanating from Herbert Spencer, to the
propositions of Adam Smith, is too close to pass observation. As we noted the
fulsome generation before Darwin was a virtual shotgun spectrum of different
evolutionary, and other, ideas, and in that spectrum, with an obvious connection
to Erasmus Smith, for example (via the Lunar Society of the early creators of
the Industrial Revolution), we see the figure of Adam Smith who is one of the
most misused thinkers of modernity. His discourse on economics stands on its own
terms, as truth or ideology, or both, but has been the object of endless
confusions as his thinking is generalized to conditions for which it wasn't
designed, and for conclusions he himself did not draw. And the connecting figure
was Malthus whose speculations about population directly influenced both Wallace
and Darwin, leading them into the mistake of oversimplifying the question of
evolution, basing it on the perception of teeming populations, the survival of
the fittest, and the population dynamics in relation to that, that was supposed
to drive evolution via exterminations of the unfit. This and the economics of
Adam Smith, and its associated political drama of the post-Revolutionary period,
seemed to have conditioned Darwin's view of life, society, and the politics of
evolution. One of the most suspicious of the ideological connections with his
work lies then in the great temptation to find the analog to evolution in the
the functioning of an abstraction that hardly exists, the market capitalism of
the post-Industrial Revolution.
The simple problem with this view is that populations of organisms in the wild cannot be demonstrated to follow the same evolutionary logic that we see in economies, the analogy is misleading or false, and that economies themselves don't follow a Darwinian logic. Economies are constructions of particular groups of economic agents, and the rules they invent condition the economies that come into existence. And therefore the evolution of economies must explain the evolution of the ideas that condition their behavior, a point obvious from the history of economic systems in world civilization, which are diverse and complex, and only become classically capitalist at a certain stage, due to the decisions of agents who have the power to enforce the rules, by force, if necessary. That is essentially a design argument for economies. So are 'evolutions' thus designed, as are economies?
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