David Hume opposes banks and favors hoarding. The only bank he reluctantly approves of is a public 100% reserve bank. Other banks increase the money supply and prices, hindering exports and economic growth. For Hume, a 100% reserve public bank would lead to “the destruction of paper-credit,”...

Commercial society changed many things, including what is considered virtuous and what is considered valuable. The increase in productivity observed in commercial society changed the ways we use our time and thus the value of time. Time is now money. So punctuality becomes a virtue. Adam Smith...

Adam Smith wrote two major books - The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and The Wealth of Nations (WN). Usually WN is described as the book promoting self-interest and TMS as the book promoting benevolence or sympathy, but not self-interest. The two books are generally described as either...

The method of analysis Adam Smith uses is relatively similar to the method economics generally uses today, especially the sub-field of experimental economics. The method of analysis that Smith uses is coherent and consistent throughout his whole work. He searches for constant variables and then...

Adam Smith's account of commercial societies as societies of strangers may be read as a moral defense of commercial societies. A society of strangers can be a fostering environment for moral development. Smith's account of moral development echoes his contemporaries' accounts of the move from...

Why should we read a book printed 240 years ago? The book is old. Our circumstances and institutions are different. Its examples are dated. Its policies are irrelevant today. Its economic theories are full of mistakes. Even its political ideology is ambiguous. So, why bother reading this old book?

It is commonplace to view market agents as self-interested knaves, while government agents are either as knaves or public-spirited angels. What are the consequences of these different motivational assumptions in modeling governmental and market behavior? We compare David Hume, James M. Buchanan,...

In his 1752 essay Of Money, David Hume proposes that a good policy for a magistrate would be to keep money still encreasing. This paper proposes that, for Hume, money can be kept still encreasing through deflationary policies, rather than through inflationary policies as commonly presented in...

Adam Smith is often associated with the idea that the desire to better one's condition makes an individual better off and also, unintentionally, makes society better off. This paper asks whether for Smith there are circumstances under which the same desire to better one's condition ultimately...