Who's Afraid of Adam Smith?
How the Market Got Its Soul
Chapter One
Letter Man
Present-day economists may know more than medieval astronomers, but
they too are captives of a single overarching idea: that most people in
everyday life are rational calculators of their own self-interest-that
they are, in economic jargon, maximizers of utility. Given a sufficient
imagination, they will come to the logically correct decision every time.
Alan Ehrenhalt
The man of systems seems to imagine that he can arrange the different
members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges different
pieces of a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces of a
chess-board have no other principles of motion besides that which the
hand impresses on them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society,
every single piece has a principle of motion of its own different
from that which the legislature might seem to impress on it.
Adam Smith
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