Structure of Adam Smith’s Ideas and Implications

Abstract

Narrowly interpreted, broad ideas Adam Smith developed was simply related to founding father of economics. Those conventional way of thinking could lead his thoughts to fragmented cognition and/or misunderstanding on his works. This paper tried a comprehensive and contextual analysis on his ideas, categorizing them into ‘social institution,’ ‘unequality and justice,’ and ‘wealth and happiness.’ When his theology, ethics, jurisprudence, justice, and cognition on happiness are well connected, they can contribute to right understanding and correlations on his thoughts. For his ‘invisible hands’ to well activate, some conditions are necessary. Above all, it requires competitive market structure and sharing information over demand and supply. As governments grow rapidly, however, market competitions are disappearing, and worse, ‘visible hands’ are getting more powerful. Human society cannot stand exclusively on benevolence, or exclusively on coercion. It requires just law system and minimum level of material resources. In Korea, Marx’s slogan, rather than Smith’s, get more and more attraction among people. Relying on these, progressive plus leftist governments would emerge and retreat. They tried so-called ‘reforms’ via Non-Smithian logic and then fail and get situation worse. Normally, another leftist government comes to solve them, via more drastic leftist policies, and result in far worse failure. Smithian ideas are not target to drive out but are sound cure for the today’s Korea is to drive toward. 300 year old Smith is still alive in his good intellectual insight, which today’s Korea and world as well are eager to find.