Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

William Grampp’s JPE article on Adam Smith is creative and provocative. It errs, however, by disparaging the invisible hand’s importance as a symbol of various economic processes that help societies prosper in ways that individuals neither intend nor comprehend. Four specific...

The invisible hand as it appears in the Theory of Moral Sentiments is commonly treated as an afterthought in discussions of the version in the Wealth of Nations, but it deserves attention in its own right. I will argue that there is an entirely coherent (if not entirely plausible) economic...

Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith's theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith's notion of value, his understanding of the economic...

Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith’s theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith’s notion of value, his understanding of the...

Adam Smith (1776) is generally ignored as an international trade theorist in textbooks and surveys because of the common belief that he only confirmed the rule of absolute advantages to explain structure of foreign trade. On the other hand, many textbooks and surveys on growth theories simply...

The paper analyzes Adam Smith’s views on monopoly focusing on Book IV and V of The Wealth of Nations and argues that Smith has left his analysis of monopoly in an embryonic form while the majority of scholars have assessed it starting from premises different from those, actually though...

Adam Smith’s outlook still inspires and informs modern sensibilities and argumentation. It is of interest beyond Smith aficionados whether a particular line of modern thought “fits” Smith. One important such dispute involves recent “left Smithian” writers who argue that he was more...

El siguiente texto tiene dos objetivos complementarios: por un lado, revisar los múltiples estudios realizados sobre el pensamiento económico de Jovellanos desde la publicación del Informe de Ley Agraria en 1795 hasta el presente y, por otro, exponer nuestra propia visión sobre el entramado...