Given that this is a panel on that quintessential Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, I can think of no better way to begin my remarks than to invoke that most enlightened of modern economists, Kenneth Boulding, who in 1971 penned the delightful essay, “After Samuelson, Who Needs Adam Smith?”
When priests and princes lost their monopoly over the big questions of human existence over the course of the Enlightenment, philosophers, poets, and ordinary people struggled to find out the answers on their own.
Adam Smith’s modern fame as the founding father of economics has, until relatively recently, obscured the fact that he saw himself as a moral philosopher.
The deregulatory zeal of the 1990s and 2000s has returned to the US and the post-Brexit plans to protect the City in the UK sound like the pre-crash light-touch mentality that fueled global regulatory arbitrage. As a result, a foremost “challenge of our time” is to stop “subsidizing more one-way bets” and “doubling down on failure.”
On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom.
Support for populism is often attributed to xenophobia, racism,
sexism;
to
anger
and resentment at
immigrants, racial or ethnic minorities, or “uppity” non-traditional women.
According
to these
accounts
, people who feel
socially resentful
may
reject
established politicians
as favoring those “others” over people like
themselves, and
turn to outsider populistic leaders.
This paper discusses what we have learned about the debt build-up in advanced societies over the past century. It shows that the extraordinary growth of aggregate debt in the past century was driven by the private sector.
