Oren Cass
speaker
818 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 3 Jun
Oren Cass’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Like it doesn't matter what you do.
Somehow magically it will work out great for everybody.
That is what it has become for a lot of modern economists.
But if you go back, the paragraph where Smith uses the term invisible hand, he only uses it once.
It actually starts by noting that he's expecting that people will prefer investing domestically to investing in foreign countries and that people will prefer to invest in the ways that produce the most things of greatest value.
What he's saying is that if that's true, if somebody pursuing profit, the way they're going to do it is by investing a lot domestically in creating things of value.
then it's like there's an invisible hand that somehow ensures that what they are doing in their own self-interest also serves the public interest.
So he's explaining how this can work, right?
This is like at the very outset of markets, people are like, whoa, what's going on here?
And he's saying, no, no, no.
See, look, if the things that people are doing to earn a lot of money also leads to good outcomes, then this could be a great system.
That's right.
I think – and so this goes to my point about like what are people doing?
What's gone wrong?
It seems to me that people in their self-interest are then always going to look at the system and say like, OK, well, is there an even easier way to make more money?
Maybe that doesn't create so much good stuff for other people.
You see over and over again throughout history that happening, right?
If you go back to the Industrial Revolution, you had a period where the Industrial Revolution was working out horribly for most workers.
I mean people were literally getting shorter, dying earlier, and people had to say like, gosh, we probably need like some labor laws.
Right?
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