Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Right? At the same time, you don’t want that stuff. It’s not mostly part of the modern bundle. So even if you ended up preferring the earlier catalog, the fact that you have to think about it reflects the changes. Ambiguities when you read the contemporaries of Smith. Other economists who were writing at the time, were his arguments just clearly, given the evidence of the time, much better than everybody around? Or was it just that, exposed, he was clearly right. But given the arguments of the time, it could have gone any one of different ways. Well, there aren’t that many economists at the time of Smith, so it depends on what you’re counting. I mean, the two fellow Scots you could compare Smith to are Sir James Stewart, who published a major work, I think, in 1767. On some matters, Stewart was ahead of Smith. Not most, clearly Smith was far greater. But Stewart was no slouch. And the other point of comparison is David Hume, Smith’s best friend. Of course, per page, you could argue Hume was better than Smith. Certainly on monetary theory, Hume was better than Smith. Now, he’s not a GOAT contender. He just didn’t do enough. But I wouldn’t say Smith was ahead of Hume. He had more and more important insights. But Hume was pretty impressive. Now, if you’re talking about, oh, the 18th-century German cameralists, well, they were bad mercantilists, but there are people, say, writing in Sweden in the 1760s, analyzing exchange rates, who had better understandings of exchange rates than Smith ever did? So it’s not that he just dominated everyone. Let me offer some other potential nominees that were not in the book for GOAT, and I want your opinions of them. Henry George, in terms of explaining how land is fundamentally different from labor and capital when we’re thinking about the economy.…

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