Economics Roundtable

Prof. Gavin Kennedy, of Heriot-Watt University (emeritus) and Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, has called my attention, indirectly, to an error in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. On page 40 of that book, I assert that Adam Smith never visited a pin factory. The full paragraph reads this ...

Second only in interest to the text of a new book is the reception it receives. Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations got a terrific review in the Sunday New York Times from Princeton economist/Times columnist Paul Krugman. It received a knowledgeable plug as well from George Mason economist Tyler Cowen, who modestly ...

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations is the beneficiary of an especially perspicacious and kind review in the Economist.  

Stanford’s John McMillan enjoyed Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. He writes, “I found no nits to pick, except one:  your use of ‘dismal science’ in a chapter heading. You might check out Carlyle’s article ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.’  Economic analysis was ‘dismal,’ in his view, because its ...

Asif Dowla, professor of economics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, points out an error on page four of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, where it is asserted that the American Economic Association has never been headed by anyone who was not an American citizen, “the three who were ...

Gavin Kennedy, emeritus professor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University and blogger at Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, is upset (May 23 entry) that Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations doesn’t do justice to the subtley of the views of Adam Smith.  It most certainly does not. But then that is not what the book is ...

Lionel W. McKenzie of the University of Rochester, a significant player in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations and careful reader of the book, has along sent ”a little paper” untangling the highly-compressed description of turnpike theorems that appears in connection with the series of conferences on growth theory that occurred in the early 1960s. [P. 156: “Exciting new theorems ...

My old friend Reuven Brenner (eight books, including History: the Human Gamble, Betting on Ideas:  Wars, Invention Inflation, and, most recently, The Force of Finance: Triumph of the Capital Markets) writes from McGill University, where he holds the Repap Chair of Business on the Faculty of Management,

I believe you make a ...

One of the problems of writing Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations had to do with deciding how to deal with the many realms in which parallel discussions had gone forward about the same time. What to say about the related work in international trade?  In industrial organization? In growth ...

This page was created to make some sort of response to the reception of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, enlarging and elaborating  mostly, annotating occasionally. To those who formed the expectation that its discourse would be incessant, or even regular, I apologize. I’ve have been traveling, visiting, working in ...