I do rather like this quote from the massively under-read 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' by Adam Smith (published 1759) quoted in a comment on this blog today:
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
I think that showed just where Smith was coming from.And please do read it in the context of the time. Whether such admiration of the rich and powerful is now necessary to 'establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society' is decidedly debatable and I would argue wholly unnecessary.
For the record the quote comes from Part I, Section III, Chapter II entitled 'Of the origin of ambition, and of the distinction of ranks'.
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It seems the hagiography of the ‘wealthy’ will continue for a little while yet if this latest announcement is anything to go by; it looks like we’ll all be expected to owe our whole existence to it. “Global firms sitting on $7 trillion war chest
The world’s corporate giants are poised to tap into record cash reserves and embark on a long-awaited spending spree, fuelling hopes of a massive boost to the global economic recovery. Companies, together with private equity firms, are coming under mounting pressure to delve into a global cash mountain of $7 trillion (£4.1 trillion) that has been amassed since the dark days of the financial crisis.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/11038180/Global-firms-sitting-on-7-trillion-war-chest.html Trying to deconstruct this; either priveq is going to be the bubble that is created to ‘grow’ the global economy after the next financial crash. Or it will be THE bubble that crashes a global economy that already has enough bubbles in it to make an Aero bar proud. Either way, it’s bad sh*t.
All of that cash and they really do have no clue what to do but buy each other – to boost executive rewards
That $7trillion will have nothing to do with the $13trillion ‘removed’ to off-shore accounts globally, of course… http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jul/21/global-elite-tax-offshore-economy
Well we can all quote Adam Smith………
“Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.”
― Adam Smith
But as always on your blog, your desire to pick the bits you like and discard the bits you don’t, result in a one sided conversation!
I have no problem with that
Of course we need ambition
It’s when it is directed at abusing the common good that it is harmful
Try again
This admiration and worship now seems to be targetted at celebrities, most of whom are unworthy of any such accolade. As a consequence the common man makes these people rich and powerful through his own actions, which is the opposite way around.
I personally think this situation arises as a result of human nature and can’t be easily eliminated, but it is interesting.
That’s ridiculous
The media sells celebrity
People consume it, I agree
But people do not create it
There is a power infrastructure of control to do that
people have even used evolutionary psychology to explain the celebrity phenomenon but this is self-serving tosh – I agree with Richard, it is a purely cultural phenomenon and we can change it with real human agency. In old testament terms-it would be referred to as idol worship!
Adam Smith gets a cursory reference in my late colleague’s treatise on the strategic risks of inequality which drew attention to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority to the detriment of many others. THis part below reflects what we observe today, particularly in Ferguson:
18. Modifying the output of capitalism is the only method available to resolving the problem of capitalism where numbers trumped people — at the hands of people trained toward profit represented only by numbers and currencies rather than human beings. Profit rules, people are expendable commodities represented by numbers. The solution, and only solution, is to modify that output, measuring profit in terms of real human beings instead of numbers.
19. We can choose to not reform capitalism, leave human beings to die from deprivation — where we are now — and understand that that puts people in self-defense mode.
20. When in self-defense mode, kill or be killed, there is no civilization at all. It is the law of the jungle, where we started eons ago. In that context, ‘terrorism’ will likely flourish because it is ‘terrorism’ only for the haves, not for the have-nots. The have-nots already live in terror, as their existence is threatened by deprivation, and they have the right to fight back any way they can.
21. ‘They’ will fight back, and do.
It was included in our second paper on Economics For Ecology.
http://www.p-ced.com/1/node/325
Adam Smith was addressing an almost rigidly hierarchical society, where there was little in the way of social mobility, and we live in a society where social mobility, which, having increased after WW2, following the 1944 Education Act, the Robbins Report and the Plowden Report, has declined markedly in recent years, just as income and wealth inequality have worsened.
A person’s moral worth is very much estimated upon the basis of how much wealth they possess, and how much their income is, in our society – this when it isn’t decided on the basis of how famous they are; and as fame, wealth and income are strongly positively correlated, the association is merely reinforced. It is no wonder that so many young people desire so earnestly to become footballers, rock stars or film stars, rather than scientists engineers, or even doctors or nurses. Why earn a living healing the sick, when you can appear on YouTube, be hashtagged on Twitter, be endlessly discussed on Facebook, and win an Emmy?
Apart from money and fame, there is power, and the third face of power. If the first face is the ability of one person or group of people to make another person or group of people do something, or not do something, against their will, and the second face of power is the ability of the powerful to exclude topics from the agenda of discussion, the third face is the ability of the powerful to control the thinking – the thought – of the rest of society. It is ideological power, and in many ways, the most powerful power of all. If Robert Dahl is the theorist of the first face, Bachrach and Baratz those of the second (http://lewisorgtheory.pbworks.com/w/page/16682128/Bacharach%20and%20Baratz%3A%20%22Two%20Faces%20of%20Power%22), then Steven Lukes is the theorist of the third (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Lukes; see also: http://sociology.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/244/power.luck.pdf). It was Kant that drew our attention to the idea that there is a distinction to be drawn between the world-as-it-is-in-itself, the Ding-an-sich, and the world of appearances, between the Noumenon and the Phenomenon. He, however, thought that the Categories (Space, Time, etc.) were universal and unchanging – see his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. It is, however, but a step to see that social factors can determine our mental world and our mental outlook – how we perceive the world, our entire Weltanschauung. Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that ‘Die Welt ist mein Vorstellung’ – the world is my representation, or idea (Ideen). For Karl Marx, the capitalist economic base created an ideological and political superstructure (ideologische und politische Ãœberbau) which determined the way people thought and saw the world, until such time as conditions became intolerable, when new ideas would arise, and people would revolt. That time is fast approaching; for a situation where 67 people own as much wealth as 3.5 BILLION people is indeed utterly intolerable, and will NOT be tolerated.