The Invisible Hand is a piece of ideological crapola meant to justify rationing goods on the basis of income rather than need or dessert aka as the free market. The hand helps up anyone with money and slaps down anyone who does not.
Cheers, ken ________________________________ From: Lakshmi Rhone <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, April 17, 2011 3:36:12 PM Subject: [Pen-l] invisible hand Nice comment by Joan Robinson: http://www.economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/07/morality-and-ec.html Haven't read Medema's new book on the invisible hand but Emma Rothschild on Condorect and Smith and Kaushik Basu's Beyond The Invisible Hand are very stimulating. Rothschild treats Smith's references to an invisible hand as an ironic joke. Basu shows that the invisible hand theorems depend on all kinds of untenable assumptions; moreover the kind of behavior that does tend to promote human flourishing is bound by norms in terms of which certain rational self-interested actions actually become unthinkable. Amartya Sen has tried to think out the full implications not of Smith's model of economic man but of Smith's moral viewpoint of the impartial spectator. From that viewpoint he develops a critique of contemporary ethical and political phillosophy and Rawls in particular. Lakshmi
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