Gavin Kennedy — Adam Smith's Self Interest is Not Served by Selfishness

Gavin Kennedy explodes another Smith myth.

George Stigler’s 1976 opening admonition that economics is founded on the “granite of self-interest” needs to be modified by the inclusion of the words “the granite of mediated self-interest”! Smith might then have saved the Chicago ‘boys’ from embarrassment in Chile if they had read Smith properly and not been enthused by Stigler’s enthusiasms for a half-understood idea that wasn’t Smith’s anyway.

"Mediated" means by serving the interests of others, you know, like customers and associates.

See also Alexis de Tocqueville on the principle of self-interest rightly understood.

 

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy
Adam Smith's Self Interest is Not Served by Selfishness
Gavin Kennedy | Emeritus Professor, Heriot-Watt University