Dear all,

Next week, on Wednesday 25th of June, Deborah Boucoyannis will present a paper on the topic “The Equalizing Hand: Adam Smith and Inequality”.
The seminar takes place at 1 pm in room EAS.E.168 (East Building) at the LSE. Everyone is welcome.

Abstract
That the market economy inevitably leads to inequality is widely accepted today. The prediction is traced back to the canonical text of classical liberal political economy, Adam Smith’sWealth of Nations. Even the most progressive interpretations of Smith assume he accepts inequality, rationalized as the inevitable trade-off for increasing prosperity compared to less developed but more equal economies. However, the prediction cannot follow from the building blocks of Smith’s system. In the economy that Smith envisaged, profits should be low and labor wages high, legislation in favor of the worker is “always just and equitable,” land should be distributed widely and evenly, inheritance laws liberalized, taxation can be high if it is equitable and used to spur productivity, and the science of the legislator is necessary to put the system in motion and keep it aligned. Political theorists and economists have highlighted some of these points, but the counter- factual “what would the distribution of wealth be if all the building blocks were ever in place?” has not been posed. Doing so prompts the question why steep inequality is accepted as an inevitable outcome of the market.


Deborah Boucoyannis is Assistant Professor at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Previously she was Lecturer in Social Studies and Olin Predoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Her PhD is from the University of Chicago. Her interests lie in the historical and theoretical foundations of liberalism.

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