Word: adamancy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like the American nation, the economic system known as capitalism is nearing a bicentennial: the 200th anniversary of the publication, in 1776, of the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith's classic work, The Wealth of Nations. In its 1,097 pages, the world found the first full description of a free economy?one in which, Smith prophesied, the drives of millions of people for personal profit, colliding against each other in an unfettered market, would produce "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people." His book rapidly became a capitalist declaration of independence from the remaining shackles...
Expectations have been rising rapidly, largely because of two developments that Adam Smith did not foresee: universal suffrage and almost universal
Vast disparities in income and wealth are the deepest philosophical and moral problems of capitalism. Adam Smith candidly acknowledged that "wherever there is great property, there is great inequality." And in his day, "for one very rich man, there must be at least 500 poor." He proposed to ameliorate that situation by having the economy produce enough wealth to make the poor less poor. Capitalism aims for?and accomplishes?infinitely more than that today. Great numbers of once-poor people rise to the middle class, or higher...
John Kenneth Galbraith implies that corporations have already killed Adam Smith's self-regulating market. In his view, the larger a corporation grows the more it can escape from the workings of the market to become a law unto itself, thus paralyzing Adam Smith's "invisible hand." According to Galbraith, large companies can set prices more or less independently of demand, produce what they rather than consumers want, and in effect ram the products down consumers' throats by the power of advertising. If corporations cannot defy the market, they can sometimes resist it for a long time when it refuses...
Today's capitalist economies undoubtedly benefit from powerful corporations. The sheer size of modern economies and the vast number of skills that must be marshaled to design and produce such products as color-TV sets and computers?to say nothing of space rockets?make any yearning for Adam Smith's world of individual entrepreneurs an exercise in pointless nostalgia...