Saturday, November 12, 2011

Robert Viennaeu's Thoughts on Economics

I've been a big fan of Robert's since stumbling upon him a couple of years ago.  He has taken up economics as a hobby and with gusto.  He has reached many of the same conclusions about economics as I have, but he still believes in it as a science that has something meaningful to say.

Today's post is a good one, and it has its own link to a piece by Gavin Kennedy, somebody who has studied Adam Smith extensively and reached a very different conclusion about what Smith actually meant by his Invisible Hand.  This quote from a paper by Getty Lustila comes from Kennedy's latest post:

For Smith, all human beings are naturally ‘in-tune’ with one another through the faculty of sympathy; which, acting as a mirror for others, allows us to take part in their suffering and joy. The ability to sympathize with our fellows is not a virtue (in the traditional sense). Instead, the faculty of sympathy is a constitutive part of human agency: devoid of sympathy, we are not human.

And that's neoliberalism's aim: dehumanization.