Adam Smith and Human Flourishing

Adam Smith was known as the champion of economic freedom. He had made three claims that has to do with human flourishing. The three claims were economic, political, and moral flourishing. These were taken from a book that Smith had written called “The Wealth of Nations”.

Economic flourishing is probably the one topic that Smith knew and wanted to educate people on. Only once did Adam smith use the term flourishing in its traditional, philosophical sense referring to the healthy state of a society or individual. This was during a passage where Smith intervened in a current debate over the desirability of "improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people”. Smith argued that the market was desirable because it alleviates the condition of the poor and helps to realize the flourishing society. He made it clear in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations that the superiority of a well-governed society consists of "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of people" and can then ensure that "a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society."

Political flourishing was only discussed slightly in the article about Smith. He didn’t really have the same kind of mind that other political leaders did. He was compared to Aristotle because they had had the same thinking style. Also in another book that Adam Smith had written called “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, Smith had compared two different types of societies. In the first type of society, the members of the first society stand in need of each other's assistance and are exposed to mutual injuries. The necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, gratitude, friendship, and esteem. The society flourishes and is happy. Then, in the second society, the members of the second society show no mutual love and affection towards one another and the society is less happy and agreeable. However, it will not necessarily be any less than the first. Society can subsist from a sense of utility without any love or affection and still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices per an agreed valuation.

In the first line of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith states "How selfish soever man may be supposed there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it". Smith began his book this way to make it clear that our happiness and the happiness of others are intimately bound up with each other. An individual can only be happy and flourish when those around him are happy and flourish. Smith said that "He (man) is sensible too that his own interest is connected with the prosperity of society, and that the happiness, perhaps the preservation of his existence, depends on its preservation”. He claims that our existence depends on the existence of society, but also that we flourish when we see others around us flourish.

A Poor Rallying Cry

A study of inequality, of income or wealth, reveals uncomfortable truths. Namely that most Americans don’t mind inequality nearly as much as pundits and academics suggest. Graham Wright of Brandeis University did a research paper and found that polled attitudes about economic inequality don’t correlate very well with the desire for government to address it. There is even partial evidence, once controls are introduced into the statistics, that talk of inequality reduces the support for doing something about it.  One possibility is that a lot of talk about inequality gives the audience the impression that it is inevitable. thereby renders potential remedies less urgent.  Another speculation is that we are constantly evaluating the status of others. To the extent, analysts reiterate that some group of citizens doesn’t have as much. maybe they’re actually reminding us that those citizens hold a lower social status. Then without even knowing it, we think that they deserve less and think less of the needs that they would need. Another possibility is that talk about economic inequality increases political polarization. Which in turn would lower the chance of effective action. Or that criticizing American society may cause us to feel less virtuous, which in turn may cause us to act with less virtue. The reality is that income inequality has gone up a great deal since the early 1980s, and we haven’t done so much to reverse the basic trend. The potentially egalitarian effects of  tax increases under the past two Democratic presidents and Obamacare have been outweighed by globalization, which benefits most those individuals who can access global markets, and by increases in the returns to highly skilled labor. The reality is that government expenditures have not become radically more poverty-reducing over the last few decades, although we do send more resources to the elderly. Over that same period of time, we have published quite a few best-selling books about economic inequality. President Donald Trump boasted he was a billionaire, and his opponents tried to take him down by suggesting that he perhaps was worth only a few hundred million dollars. That's not exactly the kind of debate you would hope to hear among people. A variety of other research papers have been showing that inequality is not a major concern. Matthew Weinzierl of Harvard Business School did a study that shows that most Americans really are willing to accept enconmic inequality. From the psychology department at Yale University, a recent study by Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom shows that people do not object to inequality, rather it is unfairness that bothers them. For instance, consider the differences in pay, security and working conditions for tenured professors versus adjuncts; citation inequality is very high too. Maybe the academic critics of economic inequality don’t really care so much about the concept either.