Russ Roberts: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Said it already. I suspect you’ll say that regardless because it’s the polite thing to say. But let’s say I don’t care about what you think. I’m independent. I’m not going to be motivated by that. That’s rather consequentialist, isn’t it? It certainly suggests a lack of integrity on my part that I need your tawdry praise, Tyler, to really make me do a good job here. So there’s a tension there. I think about this a lot with Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs claimed he didn’t care what people thought. He acted that way a lot. He went barefoot to the office when he was young. He was cruel. He was incredibly demanding and didn’t care whether he was loved by his employees. I think he would’ve said he was oblivious to the praise of others. Yet he wanted to put a dent in the universe. He wanted somebody’s praise. I’m not sure whose. That’s an aside, but my point is that I think you could read Smith — and I think this would be wrong — but you can read Smith as saying, “People are dishonest. They’re not true to themselves. They dissemble because they want the praise of other people.” I think that’s the wrong way to think about it as a human being. Again, I don’t know what Smith really thought, but for me, when I think about how pleasant it is when someone says something nice about me, I try to discount it. I try not to use that as a motivator for me. I don’t want to use that as a motivator. I want to do it for its own sake — the right thing, whatever it is. I know I’m prone to manipulation through praise, as I think many of us are, as human beings. There’s a certain tension that Adam Smith doesn’t write about so much that I think it’s not easily resolved. Given that the latter sections of Wealth of Nations seem to be arguing that the division of labor can, in fact, work out for both education and protection, was the ultimate point of the whole book Wealth of Nations, in a way, to respond, actually, to Plato and Socrates? Is that the right way to read Wealth of Nations?…

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