Event details

James A. Moffett '29 Lectures in Ethics

The Moffett Lecture Series aims to foster reflection about moral issues in public life, broadly construed, at either a theoretical or a practical level, and in the history of thought about these issues. The series is made possible by a gift from the Whitehall Foundation in honor of James A. Moffett ’29.

The "Wealth of Nations" Problem

Speaker: David Singh Grewal, University of California, Berkeley School of Law


David Singh Grewal is Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches in its Jurisprudence and Social Policy doctoral program. He is affiliated faculty in the UC Berkeley Political Science department and the Political Economy program. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, was published by Yale University Press. A second book, Democracy in America, co-authored with Jedediah Purdy (Duke Law School) is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2027. His lecture, “The Wealth of Nations Problem,” draws on material from a third book, The Invention of the Economy: A History of Economic Thought, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. Grewal has published on legal topics in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and several other law reviews, and on a variety of questions in political theory and intellectual history in several peer-reviewed journals. His public writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, American Affairs, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the BioBricks Foundation and a co-founder of the Law and Political Economy blog. Before moving to Berkeley Law School, he was Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. He holds a B.A. (Economics) and Ph.D. (Political Science) degrees from Harvard and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Details:
In his talk, David Singh Grewal will suggest that we can identify a specific and potentially revealing “problem” in Adam Smith’s work, which he calls the “Wealth of Nations Problem.” This problem concerns the tension, even the incompatibility, between the two guiding metaphors in the Wealth of Nations: the “pin factory” and the “invisible hand.” More precisely, the Wealth of Nations problem centers on the analytic difficulty of incorporating “economies of scale” in production into a theory of general equilibrium in the economy.

Naming the problem in these terms is slightly anachronistic in foregrounding the technical apparatus of mid-twentieth century economics, which Smith of course did not utilize. But the anachronism may help shed light on an underlying conflict between Smith’s joint use of the “pin factory” and the “invisible hand” in his justification of commercial society—and in the justifications of many who followed him. Identifying the Wealth of Nations problem provides a useful framework through which to organize and interpret roughly two centuries of economic theory from the moral sciences of Smith’s time through the classical political economy that followed him to mid-twentieth-century neoclassical economics. Locating the problem in Smith’s germinal text helps highlight continuing difficulties in the formal depiction and analysis of the economy following the Wealth of Nations. Among others, it allows us to discern the residue of unresolved eighteenth-century debates over “value” that continue to complicate our thinking about markets and politics today.