“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their self interest.”
… For example, one of the volumes in the Austen family library was Thomas Percival’s A Father’s Instructions: Moral Tales, Fables, and Reflections, a children’s commonplace anthology that proselytized for the new sciences and moral thought of the Enlightenment. A footnote in the reissued 1781 edition points Percival’s younger readers to Smith’s description of the process of making a pin in The Wealth of Nations, the famous demonstration of the division of labor at work. (Yes, indeed: children’s books came with footnotes back then.)
.. But if any Smith book was likely to have sat on an Austenian side table, it wasn’tThe Wealth of Nations, but the work that Smith himself considered foundational, and thus revised a staggering six times over the course of his lifetime, up until the year of his death. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) introduced Smith’s concept of sympathy. This was a word used slightly differently in Smith’s time than in our own, and doesn’t have much to do with the modern tendency to click like on a Facebook friend’s engagement announcement to show our support, or to feel terrible about the plight of child soldiers. It referred instead to the mortar of civilized society, the way that we modify our behavior as we come to an understanding of how others see us and realize that they cannot regard our problems in the same close and passionate way that we do.
.. “As to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbor is capable of loving us.” We might, if we listen closely, hear a slight echo in bookish Mr. Bennet’s philosophy: “For what do we live for but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
.. it is only our self-delusion that it is better to be rich that “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” This deception farms the fields, builds the cities, creates the surplus that enables the existence of art and literature, something higher than the hardscrabble for mere existence.
.. Smith never can decide how one should feel about the pursuit of wealth. On the one hand, it keeps in motion the industry of mankind. On the other, it doesn’t make people very happy.
.. After all, without Marianne’s earlier self-deception, there wouldn’t be much of a novel. (Elinor and Edward are clearly not emo enough to sustain three volumes of agony, even with the Lucy Steele complication lurking.) Literature is generated in the end by someone’s failure to recognize nature’s deception, just as Adam Smith promised.
Britain Fails to Find Riches It Expected in Swiss Accounts
The amounts at stake are enormous. In 2012, the British government estimated that Britons had amassed more than 40 billion pounds, or $68.5 billion, in Swiss banks. Some conservative estimates of the amount of money tucked away in tax havens and out of reach of governments worldwide range as high as $21 trillion — more than the gross domestic product of the United States.
.. The finances of the trust are so complicated, according to a document filed in the trial, that, under a 2009 divorce agreement, Mr. Ecclestone’s former wife agreed to pay him about $100 million a year. In effect, the authorities say, it is a kind of alimony “inversion.”
.. Jason Collins, a tax lawyer with Pinsent Masons in London, said that the likely locations include Singapore and Dubai. Other experts see money shifting to Mauritius, Seychelles, and Hong Kong.
William Deresiewicz: Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
Learning how to think is only the beginning, though. There’s something in particular you need to think about: building a self. The notion may sound strange. “We’ve taught them,” David Foster Wallace once said, “that a self is something you just have.” But it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.
.. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
.. Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan, or if one plays the cello and the other lacrosse. Never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.
.. The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself.
The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats
What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly.
.. The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
.. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy.
.. You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don’t need food stamps. They don’t need rent assistance. They don’t need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won’t need as large a welfare state.