Stephen Dubner

It was a pretty good answer.

Good enough to go on a T-shirt, at least.

Stigler and a few other Chicago economists had had a tremendous impact on the reputation of a man who by then had been dead nearly 200 years.

That is Dennis Rasmussen, another Smith scholar.

He is a political scientist at Syracuse University.

The phrase the invisible hand appears exactly once in The Wealth of Nations.

It is in a section about whether local businessmen would be tempted to use foreign trade to enrich themselves at the expense of their nation.

Smith's argument was that no, they wouldn't.

Why not?

Whether Smith was actually right in this regard and whether his reasoning holds up today is

That is a matter of debate.

During the past few decades of economic globalization, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

In any case, Smith's phrase, the invisible hand, has come to mean something different.

And that's Craig Smith, yet another Adam Smith scholar.

He is at the University of Glasgow.

But the unintended consequences being what economists call positive externalities versus any negative externalities, correct?

What Craig Smith is saying here is that the phrase the invisible hand today is used to imply that economic markets will operate perfectly well if you just let them be.

Even though that's not what Adam Smith was saying.

Here is Dennis Rasmussen again.

Do you think economists, including the Chicago School, knowingly exploited Smith's teachings, knowingly cherry-picked for their purposes?