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by emptyfile 2321 days ago
What? Smith? As in Adam Smith the guy who died in the year 1790?

I'm not a historian but I'm pretty sure his ideas about history aren't relevant to us in the year 2020.

2 comments

Might want to read the article first.

The first two words after the title are "Adam Smith". Later text confirms that it's the same person, with "The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money."

The idea of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, many interested economists and philosophers of economics argue, can still be used very fruitfully to analyze current economic and societal conditions. The fact that some of their analyses were dropped as the discipline of economics grew out of political economy is not necessarily a sign that the analyses were deficient. Alan Freeman has some essays on the ideological motivations which led to their analyses of labour and capital being dropped.