My HCJ seminar paper

Adam Smith – Of the Different progress of opulence in different in Different Nations

Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. He studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume in 1750. In their writings covering history, politics, philosophy, economics, and religion, Smith and Hume shared closer intellectual and personal bond than with other important figures of the Scottish enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’. In his later life he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith returned home and spent the next ten years writing ‘The Wealth of Nations’. It was published in 1776 and was considered his best work and the first work of modern economics. He is often described as a prototypical absent-minded professor. Today Smith's reputation rests on his explanation of how rational self-interest in a free-market economy leads to economic well-being.

Chapter 1

The Wealth of Nations is a reflection on economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and argues that free-market economies are more productive and beneficial to their societies. In book three Of the Different Progress of Opulence in Different Nations, Smith stresses the importance of agriculture in the developing world of the 18^th century. Smith says ‘according to the natural course of things, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures and last of all to foreign commerce’. He believes that ‘before any towns could be established, their lands must have already been cultivated and some sort of coarse industry of the manufacturing kind must have been carried on in those towns before they could think of employing themselves in foreign commerce.’

Smith is suggesting that a market with governmental regulation severely disturbs the orderly development of agricultural resources. They prevent the orderly subdivision of the land among farmers and other users and instead secure great landholdings in the hands of aristocratic landlords.

Smith suggests that someone earning money by his own labour benefits himself. Unknowingly, he also benefits society because to earn income on his labour in a competitive market, he must produce something others value. Not only do the manufacturers benefit their consumers, but they also benefit other skilled manufacturers through serving one another. In chapter 1 of book three, Smith says ‘such artificers, too, occasionally in need of the assistance of one another; and as their residence is not like that of the farmer, necessarily tied down to a precise spot, they naturally settle in the neighbourhood of one another, and thus form a small town or village’.

Smith then reasonably states that the quantity of the finished work these manufacturers sell to their consumers necessarily regulates the quantity of the materials and provisions they buy because the amount they sell reflects the amount of money they make in order to continue manufacturing beneficial produce.

Smith also talks about our North American colonies where there is still uncultivated land available in comparison to countries where there is no uncultivated land or none to be had upon easy terms. He says ‘in North America, when an artificer has acquired a little more stock than necessary, he does not attempt to establish it with a manufacture for more distant sale, but employs it in the purchase and improvement of cultivated land. He feels that an artificer is the servant of his customers, but a planter who cultivates his own land is really a master, and independent of all the world’.

However, he says ‘countries where there is no uncultivated land, every artificer who has acquired more stock, prepares work for more distant sale.’ Smith argues that these different manufactures become gradually subdivided which he believes helps prosperity, however, in seeking for employment to a capital, agriculture is naturally preferred to manufacture because it is exemplifying economic virtues such as hard work, initiative, and self-sufficiency.  Smith concludes chapter 1 explaining that the cause for prosperity begins with agriculture, then manufactures and lastly the foreign commerce because for any towns to be established, lands must have been cultivated first to lead to the growth of society.

Chapter 2

In his second chapter, Smith refers to the discouragement of agriculture after the fall of the Roman Empire. The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the events traditionally marking the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the European Middle ages. The German and Scythian nations invaded the western provinces of the Roman Empire, leaving the towns deserted and the country uncultivated.

Smith says ‘the proprietor furnished them with the seed, cattle and instruments of husbandry. The produce was divided equally between the proprietor and the farmer’. The relationship is like a form of sharecropping. They cultivate land owned by a landlord, for a share of its stock.

However Smith notices the issues. He explains there is a fundamental trade-off between the incentives and the distribution of the gains from trade. The cultivators get only half of the returns to any investment they make. He says ‘the laws relating to land were all calculated for what they suppose the interest of the proprietor. It was for is interest, that no lease granted by any of his predecessors should hinder him from enjoying the full value of his land.’

Chapter 3

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Smith says that the ‘cities of Italy seem to have been the first in Europe which were raised by commerce to any considerable degree of opulence,’ because Italy lay in the centre of what was at that time the improved and civilised part of the world. Italy soon transformed, trading cities imported the improved manufactures and expensive luxuries of richer countries and exchanged food to the great proprietors, who purchased them with great quantities of the rude produce of their own lands. A taste for the more expensive luxuries and improved manufactures was introduced into countries which had no such produce. However, when the taste became a demand in these countries, in order to save the expense of the carriage merchants had produce some manufactures of the same kind in their country.

 Smith argues that no large country could manage to subsist or pay the expenses of its society without some sort of manufactures being carried on in it. 

Chapter 4

In chapter 4, Smith goes on to explain how the commerce of the towns contributed to the improvement of the country.  He outlines three different ways which explain their contributions.

Firstly, he explains that by giving encouragement to the cultivation and improvement of the countries rude produce, benefits both the traders and consumers. The rude produce being charged with less carriage would allow the traders to pay the growers a better price for it and afford as cheap to the consumers as that of more distant countries.

Secondly Smith believes that the wealth acquired by people of cities was frequently used to purchase uncultivated lands. He argues that Merchants are ambitious of becoming country gentleman and therefore, when they invest in uncultivated lands they are most likely to be, as Smith says, ‘the best of all improvers’. I think he argues this mainly because Merchants are more so engaged in retail trade and so will employ his money chiefly in profitable projects compared to a country gentleman who is likely to employ it chiefly in expense. So the more merchants invest in uncultivated land, the more profit and success and improvement there will be.

Thirdly, commerce and manufactures introduced order and good government. He believes the government are able to give individuals liberty and security who previously lived in a sate of war and dependency. Here, smith mentions David Hume who he describes as ‘the only writer who, so far, has taken notice of it.’

Jonathon Swift – A modest proposal

Jonathon Swift was an Irish satirist and essayist born in 1667. In 1702, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College in Dublin, soon after he travelled to England where he published A Tale of Tub and The Battle of the Books in 1704. He began to gain a reputation as a writer and became increasingly active politically. Swift was part of the inner circle of the Tory government and often acted as mediator between the secretary of state for foreign affairs and lord treasurer and Prime Minister.

In 1729, Swift published A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, in which the narrator recommends that the poor mothers of Ireland escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich. He is clearly writing with humour and with the purpose to entertain however, he goes in to such great detail for ways of making a ridiculous and entirely unrealistic solution possible that I think he’s quite cleverly given the piece a kind of serious tone too.

Swift begins the essay by discussing in a sympathetic and un-ironic way, the sadness of the lives of the starving beggars in Ireland. He says that mothers are deprived from and are ‘forced’ to beg on the streets to provide for their ‘helpless infants’. Swift’s language here reflects the common view of his day, if beggars were poor, it was their own fault.

He continues to say ‘it’s a great grievance’ but with less sympathy he asks for a ‘fair, cheap and easy method’ of making these children useful members of society and anyone who could devise a way to make these street children into productive members of society would be doing the nation a great service. He almost leads the reader to think he is being serious and sympathetic but then leaves the reader in surprise when he goes on to say:”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled’.

Swift’s own ‘intention’ he says, goes even further than providing for the children of ‘professed beggars’ but also for all ‘infants of a certain age’ whose parents, though they have not yet resorted to begging, are too poor to support them.

Having considered Ireland’s population problem for many years, Smith suggests that the ideas and schemes of others upon the subject are inadequate as he says they have been ‘grossly mistaken in the computation’. This suggests he has been analysing his idea with others and remarkably sees his as the best possible solution. 

I think Swift cleverly led people away from thinking he would suggest anything that cause any harm to children such as eating them by referring to women who abort their children as ‘murderers’. Swift draws attention to the incongruity between a ruthless reason and a human social and political reality. 

Swift says ‘I shall now humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection’. The irony of Swift’s piece turns on the assumption that his audience, no matter what ethnic and social background they have will agree that eating children is morally satisfactory.

 Swift even goes on to discuss the price of the meat. Since a one-year-old baby weighs, on average, only twenty-eight pounds, the flesh will be relatively expensive. These children, therefore, will be marketed primarily to Ireland's rich landlords, who, as Swift points out, "have already devoured most of the Parents" anyway.

The word "profit," refers at various points to economics, morality, and personal indulgence. When Swift looks at who stands to profit from the sale of infant flesh, as Adam Smith points out that the manufacturer and the consumer both benefit from the process, Swift notices that not only does the family that earns the eight shillings, but also the landowner who will earn a certain social status by serving such a delicacy, and the nation that will obtain relief from some of its most problems. In this way, Swift keeps reminding his reader of the different value systems that bear on Ireland's social and political problems.