Smith on Sympathy and Selfishness in the Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapters 1-3

I'm hardly the first person to note that "The Adam Smith Problem"--that apparent contradiction between the sympathy ascribed to humanity in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the self-interestedness ascribed to humanity in The Wealth of Nations--is itself problematic, based as it is on a mistaken premise about what Smith actually argues in these texts. But, revisiting Smith this weekend, I'm struck by the fact that these two texts are more attuned to each other than even mainstream Smith scholarship seems to think. (I say this knowing that, despite relatively wide reading at this point, I still haven't scratched the surface of Smith scholarship...so it's both possible and likely that I've missed a source that takes a similar view to the one I'm about to outline!)

This term, I'm teaching a grad seminar on various conceptual (rather than historical or practical) overlaps between narrative art (especially opera) and economic theory in the 18th century. The purpose of the course is not to ask how the economics of performance or artistic production worked back then, but rather to investigate how the various ideas and preconceptions that gave rise to the birth of economics (especially to Smith's writings) also structured the way various artists were thinking about character, narrative, plot, and psychology at the time--that is to say, how the conceptual structure of early economic thinking enabled a certain kind of artistic output to arise. We've spent the first few weeks of term grappling with various musicological texts on market culture and its effect on the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven especially--but starting next week, we will begin to read Smith. I opted to begin with WN rather than TMS.

My romp through WN this weekend is my second time opening this book. I read it for the first time in 2021, and now I'm rereading portions specifically with an eye to class discussions this term. Reading it the first time, I was overwhelmed by the system of thought it put across, and the encyclopedic completeness with which it communicated this system. It was also the first Smith I had read. Now as I reread it, I have the benefit of also having read TMS, his History of Astronomy, a bunch of his essays (including the excellent writings on music, the imitative arts, etc.), and some of his lectures on rhetoric.

All of this is to say, I'm approaching WN with a vastly different structure of background knowledge from what I had back in 2021. And the experience of reading even the first few chapters is indeed strikingly different from what I recall from two years ago. Here are the things that stand out to me, on the level of argument and rhetoric.

First, and most broadly--and pace all those commentators (such as Russ Roberts, whose How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life is fun, but now seems a bit misleading)--Smith does not begin WN with an appeal to selfishness. There is a famous sentence, quoted by virtually all the commentators I've read, which runs:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love..."

Yes, it's clear that this is the ur-statement of self-interest it is often taken to be; yet I find it significant, upon re-approaching this text, that it is placed in Chapter 2 rather than Chapter 1. Chapter 1, far from promulgating (much less recommending) a view of the fundamental selfishness of people, is all about the seeming-miracle of coordination among those who work together in individual industries. Smith marvels at the productiveness that arises with the division of labor, and implies, both in this first chapter and in Chapter 3, that the mechanism which allows the general increase in prosperity, productivity, and well-being to occur is a result of mutual, imaginative sympathy as much as it might be a result of self-interest. Chapter 1 reads like proto-Hayek on the distribution of knowledge through society (and anticipates, also, the famous "I, Pencil" essay by Leonard Read. Smith portrays the most successful people as those who work together to complement each others' needs, and even in his appeal to the "limit of market power" in Chapter 3, he suggests that an awareness of other people's interests and desires is itself the factor that determines what professions each individual can pursue. In itself, this framing of the first chapter, and the fact that Chapter 2 (with the "self-interest" statement quoted above) is tucked quietly between Chapters 1 and 3, undermines the apparent distinction between the worldview encoded in TMS and that encoded in WN.

There are some other interesting quirks of rhetoric and argument I noted as I made my way through these chapters, as well. For instance, I am struck by the mode of presentation of the division of labor idea. Smith could easily have begun the book with a statement along the lines of what we read in Chapter 2; he could also have begun Chapter 1 with a clear, overarching statement of the idea he will come to by the end of the chapter. Instead, however, he begins immediately with an example. He states that it will be easier for the reader to grasp the overall concept if he begins this way--a bit inductivistic, alas, but unsurprising given the Zeitgeist--but what he actually does, right on the first page, is to make a basic point about invisibility and evidence. He states that the effects of the division of labor are greatest precisely where they cannot be observed directly: in small enterprises, he tells us, it's easy to see people working on individual components of a project, whereas in large societal enterprises the work is so widely distributed that nobody can actually see all of it happen, nor grasp the extent of division it takes to complete it. Reading this passage after having read the History of Astronomy, I'm struck by the fact that this explanation is a concrete manifestation of a point he implies w/r/t the philosophy of science, namely that the task of science is to explain the seen in terms of the unseen. He immediately appeals to, and strengthens, his reader's tolerance for arguments invoking invisible mechanisms. The effect of this is not only to lead up to the famed Invisible Hand (though I think it does that as well!), but to bolster the subsequent arguments and anecdotes concerning coordination and the extent/power of the market, which relies on a sense that an invisible network of sympathies and imaginings connects all of the individual people in society.

Even the statement concerning self-interest, in Chapter 2, is not what it seems when quoted out of context. Smith begins the chapter by distinguishing the behavior of animals from that of humans. Animals have to look cute, he says, and appeal to humans' good nature, if they want a human to pamper them. Humans, he says by contrast, are forced to think rationally about what other people want. The ensuing statement about the self-interestedness of the butcher, baker, and brewer looks on the surface like it defends a view of humanity as intrinsically selfish. But it seems to me that it rather urges people to sympathize more with those around them, for the very mechanism by which we could even imagine the desires of the baker, brewer, or butcher is precisely the sympathetic impulse taken up in TMS. Smith speaks explicitly of self-interestedness, but implicitly gives us an explanatory structure that depends entirely on sympathy, coordination, and an imaginative effort towards fellow-feeling.

Finally, I'll just note a few fun things that occurred to me while reading today. First, Smith anticipates the argument (end of Chapter 1) that it's better to be a poor person in a wealthy nation than a wealthy person in a very poor nation. He puts the point in terms of Britain vs. Africa; but of course what comes to my mind, also, is the quite uncontroversial claim that I'm better off living in middle-to-lower class America in 2023 than I would be if I could change places with even the wealthiest nobleman in 1600. (This point is underscored, also, by my current reading of Katherine Rundell's John Donne biography, which paints a grim picture indeed of many aspects of life back then.) Second, I was struck by Smith's observation that automation generally makes things better for workers--a point anticipating Milton Friedman's argument to the same effect. Friedman said in some lecture or other that the invention, say, of running water did more to alleviate the lot of the poor than of the ultra-rich, since, as he puts it, the wealthy have always had running water (carried on the backs of their slaves or servants), and that it is in fact those carrying the water who are saved from their toil by the advance of technology. For Smith, too, it is the boy who wants to play with his friends who benefits from ingeniously devising a mechanism to do his work for him. This anticipates the Suitsian Utopia laid out in The Grasshopper, in which only those who wish to work need to work, and everyone else is essentially playing games. Finally, I will just gleefully note that Smith, too, treats animals (Chapter 2) as being essentially automata, a point that slots nicely alongside my earlier, cursory musings about Descartes and ChatGPT.

ChatGPT and the animals

 Like most people I know, I've spent the last month+ experimenting with ChatGPT. I've asked it to write poetry; I've asked it arcane questions about various books and articles; I've asked it to create imaginary dialogues, podcasts, arguments, and debates between thinkers I admire from different centuries. And like most people who have put the new platform through its paces, I've come away with a mixed appraisal of its various skills. I've been impressed by its ability to handle requests that generally fall under the banner of what people think of as "creative" tasks; its poetry, for instance, especially within certain constraints, is a particular highlight. And I've enjoyed the dialogues it can come up with, spinning genuinely interesting fictional conversations between historical figures who, in reality, never met. I've been less taken with its logical abilities, which are questionable at best, and at worst make it abundantly clear that the bot isn't actually thinking, but just parroting text back at us. David Deutsch's flying-horse question gives a neat demonstration of this: the bot flatly contradicts itself and misunderstands the question in a way that can only mean it doesn't actually know what it's saying.

Playing with the bot has afforded one kind of pleasure; but nearly as fun and interesting has been to observe various public thinkers' reactions to this new technology. In particular, I've been struck by the far-reaching claims voiced by Tyler Cowen, who for much of this year has been making cryptic references to a coming revolution in AI tech that, he argues, will entirely transform how we use the internet, as well as how we work with and produce ideas. He says that ChatGPT is just the first step on this path--"bread crumbs, not dessert"--and although he could well be right, some of the individual claims he makes seem questionable to me.

For instance, he claims in a recent blog post that ChatGPT's linguistic competence likely narrows the gap between human and animal intelligence. This seems wrong to me--indeed, it's striking that one could make exactly the opposite argument just as plausibly (perhaps more plausibly). Although Tyler doesn't flesh out his version of the argument, I assume his line of thought would run something like this: ChatGPT displays enormous competency without needing to think; the competency approaches that of humans w/r/t language-use; this suggests that we aren't quite as special as we thought, and that other program-running devices like animals (which are like versions of ChatGPT, except they're programmed by evolution rather than by OpenAI) can approach the type of skills we have; thus we differ from them in degree rather than in kind.

However, that argument says much more about Tyler's "priors" than it does about humans or ChatGPT. If anything, to my eyes an argument with the exact opposite conclusion seems even more compelling! Here goes: ChatGPT shows that a program can display enormous competencies without needing to think; animals display enormous competencies, which many people want to attribute to thought; however, we can now see a demonstration that behavior that strikes a casual human observer as thought-like might not depend on thought at all; thus, it follow that animals might not actually need to think in order to perform the tasks they can perform; and if that's the case, the gulf between humans and animals is very likely to be wider than people think!

Of course, the fact that ChatGPT demonstrates that an entity can perform thought-like actions without thinking says nothing about the question of whether some other entity does need to think. So, this argument is purely analytic. CPT's ability to write sonnets doesn't ultimately settle the question of whether rats are conscious. But the version of the argument that I've laid out seems, to me, to increase the plausibility that complex behavior by non-humans can be accomplished algorithmically. Of course, just as Tyler's version of the argument says more about his priors than it does about animals, the same is true for my version. I was already inclined, intuitively, to buy the arguments of philosophers who think that consciousness exists only in people.

Tyler's other claims about the philosophical implications of ChatGPT seem equally stretched. He asks, for instance, why the aliens haven't visited us. Now that we see how easily the trappings of intelligence can be conjured by programmers, surely evolution or some other such force must have created far more intelligence across the universe than we can know? But, to build on Deutsch's point about GPT and the flying-horses, the better conclusion to draw would be that the outward suggestion of intelligent behavior is misleading, and that genuine thought remains rare, on our planet and possibly elsewhere as well.

New article: 17th-century German violin technique

 My new article has just been published in Early Music, and is available on the OUP website!

Link: "Violin technique and the contrapuntal imagination in 17th-century German lands"

Because the pandemic introduced so many difficulties for reviewers and publishers, this article was very slow to move through the pipeline. In fact, although it was only published a few weeks ago, it was the first thing I wrote after I finished my PhD in 2019. I wanted a wee break from writing about Mozart, so I turned to one of the other topics I've spent a lot of time thinking about. (And indeed, some of the observations that wound up in the article originated in posts here, way back in the first iteration of my attempts as a blogger, c.2014-2015!) I also wanted to explore a few ideas about evidence, explanation, and epistemology, so I tried to angle the topic in such a way that it wouldn't just be about violin technique, but something far more elusive and speculative: the imaginative structures that arise in the player's mind when an instrument is used in a particular way.

Music Notation CSI (Or, how did H.I.F. Biber tune in 1681?)

When historically-interested performers need guidance on practical issues, we often look for answers in 18th-century treatises. (Or, if we don't, we really should: as I've already discussed.) Anyone who has talked to me about this topic knows that I'm a passionate believer in the power of treatises to enrich us in ways that recordings and teachers can't.

Still, I concede that 18th-century sources are limited. They can't actually play for us; their musical advice must be approximate, mediated by language. Furthermore, each treatise represents its author's viewpoint, but that author is rarely a composer we care about. We may read, say, Geminiani and Türk; instruments in hand, however, who wouldn't rather play Corelli or Beethoven? And one often wonders whether Leopold Mozart's theoretical advice really applies to his son's mature compositions, or whether, by the late 1770s, a surname was the only thing Wolfgang and his father had in common.

In many cases, treatise-reading encourages generalization, while performing should really be about specificity. Unless we devote unrealistic amounts of time to reading an unrealistic number of treatises, we risk overburdening a few authors. Thus, Geminiani becomes a go-to source for all Italian music; likewise, so many French performances ape Muffat.

(As an aside: the widespread Muffat-infatuation has always puzzled me. Look at the dates: he went to France briefly in his late teens, and didn't write the treatise until decades later. Is his evidence reliable? I wonder, too, why nobody seems interested in his German bowings. They could be applied to Bach and Telemann, who, despite vaguely-Francophone interests, were writing German music, in Germany, to be performed by German musicians and consumed by German audiences.)

Muffat's Treatise: Menuet. The German bowing is above, the French is below. Note that the German version begins on an upbow, and is entirely bowed out. Presumably, the upbow at the beginning is meant to accommodate the figures in bars 3, 5 and 6.

Having now made a meal of the appetizer, I hasten to my main point: Treatises aren't our only option! We can steal the occasional glimpse into past practices by searching for clues within the notation. Of course, most notation is neutral, and we need treatises to help unravel "what" (if anything) it "means". But, sometimes, a composer leaves a clue.

For example, on the question of whether Mozart's grace-notes should be played on or before the beat, treatises are unhelpful. Most say nothing; Quantz, writing in Berlin, gives the wrong answer. We know that Quantz is wrong because an examination of the Minuet from Mozart's KV 304 reveals grace-notes of three different durations, all in a single phrase:

Copyright restrictions prevent me from posting from the NMA, but see here for an urtext original. Amazingly enough, all editions on IMSLP show incorrect grace-notes! (In our age of increasing IMSLP-reliance, it's a reminder not to believe everything posted there.)

At once, we infer that note-value does matter for grace-notes. It follows that they have to be on the beat -- after all, if grace-notes were to be played before the beat, could a quarter note be distinguished from an eighth or sixteenth?

The notational clues are not always even related to performance-practice per se. The example that inspired this essay comes from Biber's Sonatae Violino Solo 1681, on my mind this month. Halfway through Sonata VI, the violinist must retune into scordatura -- the only instance of mid-sonata retuning I'm aware of pre-1900:

I've spent the last few days testing various different retuning methods. When I last performed this piece, a few times in 2011, my habit was to knock the E string completely slack, and then retune it from scratch. (This seemed to improve the stability, but it takes a lot longer to bring off.) Now, I'm considering inching down from E to D, and then simply adjusting as necessary if the string creeps sharp -- the quick fix. After all, Biber's dramatic pacing is characteristically perfect, and drawn-out retuning would do more harm than would a slightly-sharp top string.

Whatever I decide to do, this moment speaks worlds about Biber -- his own ability to tune quietly and accurately, and his flexible stance towards tuning in general. There are also subsidiary inferences, such as the thickness of his E string (it must still have sounded good when loosened to D) and the stability of his G string (with the slightly decreased tension on the bridge, my own Aquilla "type F" silver-wound, sheep-gut string goes unplayably sharp).

Have you encountered any other moments in music pre-1830 when these sorts of indications are buried in the notation? My instinct is that such notational clues don't surface on our music stands every day...