Adam Smith Institute

The libertarians? Cato https://www.cato.org/publications/trade-buys-goods-services-time#telev… Cato “One of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics.” https://www.cato.org/commentary/cheap-talk-cheap-stuff The Adam Smith types: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/economic-nonsense-25-with-fre… "Many consumer goods follow the same trajectory; most recently smartphones have done so. Far from being left behind, the poor are pulled along by the progress that initially caters for the rich."

It's the best example of a fiat Ponzi scheme. Keep printing money to keep the guys near the printer (at the top of the pyramid) flush. USD and other fiats are doing the same. Just at a much slower rate. Edit: It's basically just the Cantillion Effect[1] by another name. [1] https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect

Directly related is "Modern Monetary Theory" or MMT. Here's a 24 minute explainer from NPR, Planet Money. https://www.npr.org/2021/01/20/958854717/modern-monetary-theory-classi… And a brief explainer from The Conversation https://theconversation.com/modern-monetary-theory-the-rise-of-economi… Also known by its detractors as "Magic Money Tree." One of those detractors is of course the Adam Smith Institute. https://www.adamsmith.org/research/the-magic-money-tree-the-case-again… I thought I remembered Freakonomics doing a fairly in-depth discussion on this, but I can't find it. Maybe I mis-remember.

Xenophobia isn't the reason intelligent people are pro 'Leave'. For example, many powerful free-trade Libertarian think-tanks backed Brexit: the Hoover Institution [0], the Cato Institute [1], the Adam Smith Institute [2], etc. These certainly aren't racist dumb-dumbs or protectionist "little Englanders", and their opinions are well worth a read. While bigots exist and certainly voted 'Leave' that does not mean that there are not good, open, free-market reasons to leave the EU. [0] http://www.hoover.org/research/cautious-yes-brexit [1] http://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulletin/europea… [2] http://www.adamsmith.org/evolution-not-revolution

The solution has been found, is in action and you should be cheering. It's called global capitalism. We are witnessing the greatest decline in absolute poverty in the history of our entire species. Moreover global inequality has been falling. "The number of people living in extreme poverty around the world is likely to fall to under 10 percent of the global population in 2015, according to World Bank projections released today, giving fresh evidence that a quarter-century-long sustained reduction in poverty is moving the world closer to the historic goal of ending poverty by 2030." You're right; nothing to do with politics. It's just letting people do business. http://www.theglobalist.com/the-real-winners-and-losers-of-globalizati… http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/george-monbiot-says-were-to-blame-for-ev…

What we are seeing here, and in many other cities across the world, reminds me of the Cantillon effect[1]. Basically, businesses which are in closer economic proximity are receiving the benefits of inflationary monetary policy sooner. This leads to higher wages for their employees, and higher profits for the B2B business partners, slowly spreading the new money out into the economy. This seems to be leading to large gluts of artificially wealthy people in some areas, bidding up prices in their local economy, and then searching for areas to move into where the effect of the recently printed money hasn't taken hold yet. The result of this would be a shift in those new economies to cater for the influx of new money coming from the newcomers, and away from dealing with locals who, for the most part, are yet to receive any of this money. And when they finally do begin to have wage increases, even more money has been created flowing at a greater rate to the newcomers. [1]: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect

Adam Smith also said the wealth of nations depended on the economic empowerment of its populace. Policies and regulations meant to better the citizens and not the corporations add the most to the wealth of the nation. Quote:”What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” And:“[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” https://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes/

I read this article back on Monday 1 September 2014 when it was first published. I didn't choose to submit here to Hacker News, as now has been kindly done, because I noted that most of the graphs of trends in the articles show that the confirmed trends are favorable trends (death rates down, birth rates down, population growth rates down, food per capita up, and so on) while the predicted unfavorable trends are still off in the unknown future. My personal prediction: Julian Simon, Matt Ridley, and a host of more optimistic projectors of trends will be more accurate in predicting further technological progress, further improvement of well being of most people in most places around the world, and sufficient natural resources (used more effectively with improved technology) to bring about rising prosperity in per-capita terms for the world as a whole and especially for the poorest parts of the world as we know the world today. Responses to the earlier MIT follow-up study[1] and the current University of Melbourne follow-up study[2] may not be definitive either (we are talking about the future, after all), but they have higher plausiblity for me as someone who has grown up with a lot of predictions of gloom and doom since the 1950s that have turned out to be wrong. [1] http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/18/the-limits-to-growth-40-year-upd… http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/09/the-club-of-romes-l… [2]…

EddieC on that page (http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/international/buy-ethically:-buy-sweatsh… says: >No, it means that without the distortions to incentives FairTrade and the like introduce, the market signals to all the most effective allocations of land, labour and capital. The thing is, and why we need fair trade, that the market signals that human lives are worth nearly nothing because there are a lot of them. In effect a purely market lead system would have (has!) people working in dangerous conditions without safety equipment (like the workers sprayed with pesticides in non-fairtrade banana plantations leaving them sick and infertile) until the supply of people runs low enough to make a sufficient price difference. If you want to live in that sort of world, a world that ignores child slavery in Western Africa because it produces cheaper cocoa beans for example, then I really have nothing but contempt for you. Fairtrade doesn't produce oversupply, it doesn't lock people in - how can sufficient funds to access healthcare, education and approach crop diversity be locking people in? It's a well put argument that nonetheless is wanting IMO, it's oozing with malevolence and contempt for humanity.

https://denmark.dk/people-and-culture/happiness/ https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/why-the-danes-are-the-happiest https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/03/why-denmark-dominates-the-worl… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygge

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/apparently-the-nhs-is-the-worlds-larges… https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/removing-faxes-p… nhs is famous dumb and has spent years trying to stop using fax machine. £330 million is nothing over a few years.. NHS budget for 2024/25 is circa £242 billion. the entire annual intake from capital gains tax is £20 million or so

Sure! Here's a source from Adam Smith institute that shows UK millionaires / billionaires decreased during that time period and high taxes are partly to blame https://www.adamsmith.org/millionaire-tracker2024

> Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history. The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism – in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between five and nine million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture. > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hunger-and-p…

The joys of wealth transfer from the poor and the middle class workers to the asset owning class via inflation and the Cantillion Effect [1]. 1- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect

and a lot of libertarians do favour UBI because it is an alterative to means tested welfare that does not distort market mechanisms. here is an example.: https://www.adamsmith.org/press-releases/rising-evidence-basic-income There is support for UBI from socialists too. The opposition comes from the "centre" - people whose main concern is maintaining the status quo.

Medieval peasants were required to work 150 days a year on their lord’s estate. That was how they paid for the land they had to farm the rest of the time to survive. They also had to spin, weave, and make clothes. Reference: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-peasants-r…

Pricing in externalities (such as national defense impact) is a basic function of economic policy. I searched 'economics 101 strategic industries' and found this[1] within 30s which includes an overview of 'national self-sufficiency'. It presents the standard argument, including the parts you claim the standard argument ignores. I personally favor decentralized planning over markets, but I find it unnecessary to slander economics. -- 1: https://www.adamsmith.org/economics-101

India until 1991 was very socialist. After 1991 they implemented reforms to reduce state controls. This [0] explains a bit better [0] https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/india-and-the-tragedy-of-socialism

> I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice I'm only learning about the history of economics myself. It seems a lot of people interpret Adam Smith as advocating against any government intervention, even in the case of price-fixing. For example: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreading-adam-smi… I'm not convinced that it's deliberate. You can draw a parallel with free speech: is it about letting anyone say whatever they want, however loudly, as much as they want? Or is it about ensuring that everyone has a voice, i.e. preventing the loud people from drowning out or otherwise intimidating the quiet ones. You could well argue for the latter, but many people in the West assume it means the former.

>This i contentious, I have actually read scholars that argue the opposite. It is far from contentious, you are probably mixing up "premodern agriculture" with "pre-agriculture". Furthermore, as detailed in an article [1] referenced (and linked to) by this post, you are probably mixing up the labor paid as rent vs the whole of the labor required to survive 1 - https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-peasants-r…

I understand the desire. We all want a machine that makes us money while we sleep. But if no one has employees, no one can buy stuff. (Looks like Ford raising wages so his employees can buy cars is false: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/henry-ford-and-the-5-a-day-wages .)

Reserves are misleading. Because people only declare resources to be reserves that have had enough investment in them to be proven to some level. See https://www.adamsmith.org/research/the-no-breakfast-fallacy for more background.

Have you read Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments? It applies the same kind of thinking found in Wealth of Nations (deriving systemic social principles from individual human motivations) to the moral sphere. He first introduced the phrase "invisible hand" in this, earlier book. https://www.adamsmith.org/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments

What you describe has a name. It's known as the Cantillon effect. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect Between fractional reserve banking with no reserve requirements, https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary202003… and unfettered government spending, it's practically irresponsible to not be in debt. Either way, your average peasant can never keep up with the wealthy asset class under this system.

The "Cantillion Effect" https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect Ethereum is already a system where those who are closest to the money printers benefit the most. At first it was oligarchic just because of its pre-mine and air drops, but PoS just takes that to a new level. You get paid to be rich. The reason this uses so much less energy is because it's so much closer to a centralized fiat currency. The only value implied by PoS is that some rich people are backing it... a lot like the dollar.

> You don’t have to be genius to understand what is going on: USA printed trillions and gave most of it to already rich people. It's also a good time to understand "The Cantillion Effect" > Namely, when you print money, it causes more pounds to chase fewer goods, pushing up the average cost resulting in inflation. His theory has been dubbed ‘The Cantillion effect’, and is a lesson to us all on the effects of inflation ‘financing the financiers’. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect https://fee.org/articles/the-cantillon-effect-because-of-inflation-we-…

What I find odd about this is that I am effectively (I hope) anonymous online, even on twitter, but I still get totally mad when people trash my ideas. It's like my ideas are a part of my extended self. This I think is why moral grandstanding is a more valuable concept than Virtue Signalling - VS wouldn't make sense in an anonymous context, and apparently signalling means something different anyway according to this: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-morality-of-tax-avoidance Let me ask you a question; have you ever deducted anything from your taxes? If so, you are “guilty” of tax avoidance. Every person claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit is engaged in tax avoidance. Anyone that ever deducted anything is a tax avoider.

Virtue signalling: https://adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling

Adam Smith favored progressive taxation. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/tax-spending/adam-smith-and-progressive…