Research Project to Challenge Modern Economists on Their Invisible Hand Explanations

I returned to more serious research today for my larger project on the invisible hand. This work has gone slowly up to now because, as I have mentioned, I am waiting for Warren Samuel’s paper to be published (now set for later this year in a collection edited by Jeffrey Young and is to be published by Cambridge University Press). I considered it prudent not to go too far ahead in case Warren’s promising treatment made my own redundant, or, in the unlikely event that Warren was off target in some fundamental way, my own paper may have required considerable re-work.

Research develops its own pace, sometimes like walking through treacle into dead-ends, tinged with boredom, and at other times flies along under an exciting momentum from the pieces falling into place, opening new insights, re-constructed ideas, and closing the gaps in understanding.

Having dealt with Adam Smith’s meaning of “an invisible hand” in two papers for the Econ Journal Watch (May and September), I am now working more intensely on phase 2, so to speak, (and have been since 2008) which analyses how and why the invisible hand metaphor was taken up, mainly in the middle decades of the 20th century, by modern economists, in part to make an ideological case for markets (sometimes tinged with theological claims and assertions) over the challenges from both creeping state capitalism and Soviet-style central planning. The other part, included genuine enthusiasm among economists from the 30s to the 70s from their pursuing lines of research into general equilibrium theory.

The problem, which I have been focussed on since my preliminary work from 2003, for my book, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy (2005), is why modern main-stream economists embedded their theories of “invisible hand” in capitalist markets and, simultaneously, attributed to Adam Smith the role of progenitor of their work.

I have been unable to read into Smith’s works anything remotely like these modern attributions – the fact that they do not qualify for such roles on the basis of what he wrote remains, for me, in stark contrast to what senior colleagues in the discipline claim to have found.

This next project is my attempt to answer this dichotomy from what distinguished economists assert they have read in Moral Sentiments and Wealth Of Nations (and his essay on the History of Astronomy) by coming at the problem from the other direction:

What exactly do modern economists claim for their “invisible hand”, where did these views originate (Chicago, MIT, LSE, and so on, and what evidence is there for such a role in their models of modern economies (general equilibrium, growth theories, welfare economics, business cycles, and recent history)?

I shall report from the research front occasionally on Lost Legacy and share my progress with readers.