Word: smithing
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...know Adam Smith for his "invisible hand," the mysterious force that steers the selfish economic decisions of individuals toward a result that leaves us all better off. It's been a hugely influential idea, one that during the last few decades of the 20th century began to take on the trappings of a universal truth...
Lately, though, the invisible hand has been getting slapped. The selfish economic decisions of home buyers, mortgage brokers, investment bankers and institutional investors over the past decade clearly did not leave us all better off. Did Smith have it wrong...
...Smith did not have it wrong. It's just that some of his self-proclaimed disciples have given us a terribly incomplete picture of what he believed. The man himself used the phrase invisible hand only three times: once in the famous passage from The Wealth of Nations that everybody cites; once in his other big book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments; and once in a posthumously published history of astronomy (in which he was talking about "the invisible hand of Jupiter" - the god, not the planet). For Smith, the invisible hand was but one of an array of interesting...
...invisible hand emerge as the one idea from Smith's work that everybody remembers? Mainly because it's so simple and powerful. If the invisible hand of the market really can be relied on at all times and in all places to deliver the most prosperous and just society possible, then we'd be idiots not to get out of the way and let it work its magic. Plus, the supply-meets-demand straightforwardness of the invisible-hand metaphor lends itself to mathematical treatment, and math is the language in which economists communicate with one another...
...quite used to the media trumpeting the trivial, be it Anna Nicole Smith or Chesley Sullenberger. But this latest obsession with a heretofore irrelevant and obscure White House staff position—the White House social secretary—is simply product of another vice: the delusion harbored by Washington media types that the trifling goings-on of their city matter to those who live beyond the Beltway. This media elite is easily distracted by bright, shiny objects, and the fact that anyone outside the White House has ever heard of Desiree Rogers is an indictment of the media?...