Question

Adam Smith (1723-1790), widely known as the father of modern economics, placed markets at the center of the political economy (i.e., the study of how a country is managed or governed, taking into account both political and economic factors). Drawing on Smith’s 1776 book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, construct an detailed viewpoint explaining multiple points that takes Smith’s thoughts and extrapolates them to a current or recent episode in history, OR a current Canadian policy issue.

Essay Question: How would Smith explain why some nations are poor while others are rich?

Answer 1

Many people mark the birth of economics as the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Actually, this classic's full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and Smith does indeed attempt to explain why some nations achieve wealth and others fail to do so. Yet, in the 241 years since the book's publication, the gap between rich countries and poor countries has grown even larger

In common language, the terms "rich" and "poor" are often used in a relative sense: A "poor" person has less income, wealth, goods, or services than a "rich" person. When considering nations, economists often use gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as an indicator of average economic well-being within a country. GDP is the total market value, expressed in dollars, of all final goods and services produced in an economy in a given year. In a sense, a country's GDP is like its yearly income. So, dividing a particular country's GDP by its population is an estimate of how much income, on average, the economy produces per person (per capita) per year. In other words, GDP per capita is a measure of a nation's standard of living.

Because GDP per capita is simply GDP divided by the population, it is a measure of income as if it were divided equally among the population. In reality, there can be large differences in the incomes of people within a country. So, even in a country with relatively low GDP, some people will be better off than others. And, there are poor people in very wealthy countries.

Whether for people or nations, the key to escaping poverty lies in rising levels of income. For nations specifically, which measure wealth in terms of GDP, escaping poverty requires increasing the amount of output (per person) that their economy produces. In short, economic growth enables countries to escape poverty

"Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world."¹
—Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General

Many people mark the birth of economics as the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Actually, this classic's full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and Smith does indeed attempt to explain why some nations achieve wealth and others fail to do so. Yet, in the 241 years since the book's publication, the gap between rich countries and poor countries has grown even larger. Economists are still refining their answer to the original question: Why are some countries rich and others poor, and what can be done about it?

"Rich" and "Poor"

In common language, the terms "rich" and "poor" are often used in a relative sense: A "poor" person has less income, wealth, goods, or services than a "rich" person. When considering nations, economists often use gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as an indicator of average economic well-being within a country. GDP is the total market value, expressed in dollars, of all final goods and services produced in an economy in a given year. In a sense, a country's GDP is like its yearly income. So, dividing a particular country's GDP by its population is an estimate of how much income, on average, the economy produces per person (per capita) per year. In other words, GDP per capita is a measure of a nation's standard of living. For example, in 2016, GDP per capita was $57,467 in the United States, $42,158 in Canada, $27,539 in South Korea, $8,123 in China, $1,513 in Ghana, and $455 in Liberia (Figure 1).²

NOTE: Liberia's GDP per capita of $455 is included but not visible due to the scale. The Republic of Korea is the official name of South Korea.

SOURCE: World Bank, retrieved from FRED^®, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGq, accessed July 26, 2017.

Because GDP per capita is simply GDP divided by the population, it is a measure of income as if it were divided equally among the population. In reality, there can be large differences in the incomes of people within a country. So, even in a country with relatively low GDP, some people will be better off than others. And, there are poor people in very wealthy countries. In 2013 (the most recent year comprehensive data on global poverty are available), 767 million people, or 10.7 percent of the world population, were estimated to be living below the international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day.³ Whether for people or nations, the key to escaping poverty lies in rising levels of income. For nations specifically, which measure wealth in terms of GDP, escaping poverty requires increasing the amount of output (per person) that their economy produces. In short, economic growth enables countries to escape poverty.

How Do Economies Grow?

Economic growth is a sustained rise over time in a nation's production of goods and services. How can a country increase its production? Well, an economy's production is a function of its inputs, or factors of production (natural resources, labor resources, and capital resources), and the productivity of those factors (specifically the productivity of labor and capital resources), which is called total factor productivity (TFP). Consider a shoe factory. Total shoe production is a function of the inputs (raw materials such as leather, labor supplied by workers, and capital resources, which are the tools and equipment in the factory), but it also depends on how skilled the workers are and how useful the equipment is. Now, imagine two factories with the same number of workers. In the first factory, workers with basic skills move goods around with push carts, assemble goods with hand tools, and work at benches. In the second factory, highly trained workers use motorized forklifts to move pallets of goods and power tools to assemble goods that move along a conveyer belt. Because the second factory has higher TFP, it will have higher output, earn greater income, and provide higher wages for its workers. Similarly, for a country, higher TFP will result in a higher rate of economic growth. A higher rate of economic growth means more goods are produced per person, which creates higher incomes and enables more people to escape poverty at a faster rate.

Economic growth of less-developed economies is key to closing the gap between rich and poor countries. Dif­ferences in the economic growth rate of nations often come down to differences in inputs (factors of production) and differences in TFP—the productivity of labor and capital resources. Higher productivity promotes faster economic growth, and faster growth allows a nation to escape poverty. Factors that can increase productivity (and growth) include institutions that provide incentives for innovation and production. In some cases, government can play an important part in the development of a nation's economy. Finally, increasing access to international trade can provide markets for the goods produced by less-developed countries and also increase productivity by increasing the access to capital resources.

When people worry about inequality today, they generally worry that it inhibits economic growth, prevents social mobility, impairs democracy, or runs afoul of some standard of fairness. These are the problems that Obama identified in his speech, and the ones that have been highlighted by academics ranging from Thomas Piketty to Joseph Stiglitz to Robert Putnam.

None of these problems, however, were Smith’s chief concern—that economic inequality distorts people’s sympathies, leading them to admire and emulate the very rich and to neglect and even scorn the poor. Smith used the term “sympathy” in a somewhat technical sense to denote the process of imaginatively projecting oneself into the situation of another person, or of putting oneself into another’s shoes. Smith’s “sympathy” is thus akin to the contemporary use of the word “empathy.” And he claimed that, due to a quirk of human nature, people generally find it easier to sympathize with joy than with sorrow, or at least with what they perceive to be joy and sorrow.

As a result, Smith held, people sympathize more fully and readily with the rich than the poor: “the rich man glories in his riches, because … they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world,” while “the poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel.” Not only are people far more likely to notice the rich than the poor, according to Smith, but they are also far more likely to approve of them, to admire them, and to emulate them; indeed, he devoted an entire chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to demonstrating that this is the case.

What’s more, Smith saw this distortion of people’s sympathies as having profound consequences: It undermines both morality and happiness. First, morality. Smith saw the widespread admiration of the rich as morally problematic because he did not believe that the rich in fact tend to be terribly admirable people. On the contrary, he portrayed the “superior stations” of society as suffused with “vice and folly,” “presumption and vanity,” “flattery and falsehood,” “proud ambition and ostentatious avidity.” In Smith’s view, the reason why the rich generally do not behave admirably is, ironically, that they are widely admired anyway (on account of their wealth). In other words, the rich are not somehow innately vicious people. Rather, their affluence puts them in a position in which they do not have to behave morally in order to earn the esteem of others, most of whom are dazzled and enchanted by their riches.

Thus, it is precisely the presence of economic inequality, and the distortion of people’s sympathies that attends it, that allows—perhaps even encourages—the rich to spurn the most basic standards of moral conduct. Smith goes so far as to proclaim that the “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition” is “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Smith also believed that the tendency to sympathize with the rich more easily than the poor makes people less happy. As I am reminded every year by my students, those who encounter Smith’s writings for the first time are usually quite surprised to learn that he associated happiness with tranquility—a lack of internal discord—and insisted not only that money can’t buy happiness but also that the pursuit of riches generally detracts from one’s happiness. He speaks, for instance, of “all that leisure, all that ease, all that careless security, which are forfeited forever” when one attains great wealth, and of “all that toil, all that anxiety, all those mortifications which must be undergone” in the pursuit of it. Happiness consists largely of tranquility, and there is little tranquility to be found in a life of toiling and striving to keep up with the Joneses.

All of this said, it is not entirely obvious that the inhabitants of today’s commercial societies admire the rich as uncritically as Smith expected they would. It is true that on the political right the wealthy are often lauded as innovators and job creators. Indeed, personal wealth is the main (perhaps sole) qualification of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. On the other hand, there is a tendency on the political left to regard the rich as greedy, rapacious one-percenters, and many on the right join in the left’s suspicion of the rich, often inspired by communitarian or religious impulses. It is doubtful that many hedge-fund managers suffer from a surfeit of uncritical approval.

Still, much of Smith’s analysis rings true today. The amount of media coverage of the lives and lifestyles of the rich and famous should suffice to confirm that even if people in today’s commercial societies do not always admire the wealthy, they do generally sympathize with them in Smith’s sense of the term—that is, people tend to put themselves in the wealthy’s shoes—far more than they do with other people. Further, even if people do not always admire the wealthy either as individuals or as a group, there is little question that they are disposed to admire and pursue wealth itself with every bit of the fervor and doggedness that Smith expected. Finally, the other half of the distortion of people’s sympathies that he describes—the tendency to unduly ignore the poor—is very much still present.