Acemoglu and Robinson Basically Ignored Adam Smith
In my Wall Street Journal op/ed on the 3 Nobel Prize winners, “A Nobel Prize in Economics for the ‘Inclusive’ Free Market,” published on line on the afternoon of the award and in print the next day, I wrote:
The Nobelists’ contribution is to lay out empirical data on the specific economic institutions that helped or hindered economic growth and then to examine the factors that led to those institutions. They point out, as Adam Smith did, that property rights and the rule of law are key.
What I didn’t get room to say, given my tight word constraint, is that in their book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson gave short shrift to Adam Smith. Look up Smith in the index, and you’ll find one reference. Go to that page and you’ll see that the reference is to the “invisible hand.” That’s it. No mention of institutions, which is a huge part of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. And there’s no mention of The Wealth of Nations in the 17 pages of References.
I was looking at the blurbs at the front of the book this morning and found this one by Niall Ferguson:
Synthesizing brilliantly the work of theorists from Adam Smith to Douglass North with more recent empirical research by economic historians, Acemoglu and Robinson have produced a compelling and highly readable book.
Acemoglu and Robinson do discuss recent empirical research by economic historians. The book is compelling and highly readable and their bibliographical essay references a number of works by Douglass North.
But the authors did not mention the work of Adam Smith. I gave above the only mention of Smith that I could find.
Postscript:
Since writing my op/ed, I came across this piece by Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It’s excellent.
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