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A review by icywaterfall
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts
4.0
Even though we are profoundly self-interested, we do not always act in what appears to be our self-interest. Why do we sacrifice our well-being to help others? Our behaviour is driven, according to Smith, by an imaginary interaction with an impartial spectator; what spurs us to take care of our neighbor is the desire to act honorably and nobly in order to satisfy the standard that would be set by this impartial spectator.
How can we be Happy? ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely’, which can roughly be translated as; we want to be loved, admired, respected, etc, AND we want to be worthy of being loved. When we earn the admiration of others honestly by being respectable, honorable, blameless, generous, and kind, the end result is true happiness. So someone who is thought to be lovely, but actually isn’t, is living a lie. Smith is encouraging us to strive for harmony between our inner and outer selves; we may be tempted to be loved without being lovely, but the wise man avoids that temptation.
But, despite that temptation, we are prone to self-deception. We want not only to be loved, we want to think of ourselves as lovely. Self-deception makes me think I’m lovely when I’m not, virtuous when I’m not; beware self-deception and beware he who thinks he’s immune from self-deception.
Money and fame don’t lead to happiness; what leads to happiness is being loved and being lovely. Smith is scathing about fame and fortune; they should be kept in perspective. Pursue money and fame and recognition, but don’t be consumed by them; don’t make them your primary aim in life; keep being loved and lovely as your primary aims in life. The former is a means to an end (more money, fame, etc) but the latter is an end in itself. If you seek more money, you’ll never be satisfied; but if you seek to be lovely and loved, you’ll always be satisfied. So if material success is so destructive, why do people pursue it so? Because the world pays attention to rich and famous and powerful people, not to wise and virtuous people. Money and fame are therefore paths to being loved and noticed by others; but if they are pursued for their own sake, they lead to downfall because you’ll always need more and more and more; eventually there won’t be any more and you’ll be left with nothing, like searching for that first high.
But what is loveliness? Smith has two answers: the first is propriety (appropriate responses to those around you), meaning acting in the way that those around us expect and that allows them to interact with us in the way that we expect. We prefer harmony in out mutual sentiments to disharmony; what I really want is that your emotions harmonize with my own as I face tragedy or triumph. Behaving with propriety is the ability to conform to the expectations of those around us, and they in turn conform to our expectations. Propriety gains you the approval of those around you, but it’s not admired. For that, you need the second thing that makes you lovely, namely:
Virtue: this is multifaceted but refers to prudence, justice, and beneficence. Prudence means taking care of yourself, justice means not hurting others, and beneficence means being good to others.
HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER: A million things are the result of human action but not human design; what’s known as emergent order. Individual choices can lead to important social outcomes; each one of us created the moral society that we inhabit by the judgments that we make. Everyone, meaning no one in particular, decides what is proper and improper. How do norms emerge from our actions? Social feedback that we give and receive influences how we behave and how others behave in response to our reactions. We want to be around good people and we shun bad people. The virtues of courtesy and kindness and thoughtfulness and compassion and honour we celebrate; lying and stealing and meanness and spite we shun.
We all have two parts to play in maintaining civilization:
We need to be lovely even when we can get away with not being lovely;
We need to encourage others to behave well and dissuade bad behaviour.
As more and more of us take these steps, our seemingly negligible actions are no longer negligible. Through our actions, we create the norms and rules of what is attractive and unattractive. When you can trust the people you deal with, life is lovelier and economic life is much easier. It’s such an advantage to live in a society of high trust in public institutions; but it’s not easy to create trust. Being trustworthy doesn’t just lead to pleasant interactions. We’re all part of a system of norms and informal rules that is much bigger than ourselves; when we behave virtuously, we sustain that system. If you want to make the world a better place, work on being trustworthy, and honour those who are trustworthy.
However, you cannot make the world a better place if you are a man of the system: the leader with a scheme to remake society according to some master plan or vision. Such people fall in love with their vision of the ideal society and lose the ability to imagine any deviation from that perfection. Utopias can be dangerous and the world is so complicated that the small things we do in our everyday lives have a bigger impact than the political movements we join. Still want to make the world better? Talk to your kids, parents, smile at people, etc. Do the small things because these are the stuff of the good life.
How did Smith come to write two completely different books, namely the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments? The former deals with how we behave in a world of impersonal exchange, which is the world of strangers, and in the latter he deals with the fact that we care more about the people around us than we do about others who are farther away. Both books simply have a different focus; both books concern different spheres of human interaction; the personal (Sentiments) and the impersonal (Wealth). There’s a stark difference between the loving world of spouse and children, where everything is shared and cooperation is generated by love, and the less friendly world of work, where cooperation is generated by the potential for profit and the fear of loss. Our economic system has to be impersonal if it is to be deliver the life-transforming gifts of better health, music, etc. In a world of specialization, this is inevitable, but this is ok. Love locally, trade globally.
How can we be Happy? ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely’, which can roughly be translated as; we want to be loved, admired, respected, etc, AND we want to be worthy of being loved. When we earn the admiration of others honestly by being respectable, honorable, blameless, generous, and kind, the end result is true happiness. So someone who is thought to be lovely, but actually isn’t, is living a lie. Smith is encouraging us to strive for harmony between our inner and outer selves; we may be tempted to be loved without being lovely, but the wise man avoids that temptation.
But, despite that temptation, we are prone to self-deception. We want not only to be loved, we want to think of ourselves as lovely. Self-deception makes me think I’m lovely when I’m not, virtuous when I’m not; beware self-deception and beware he who thinks he’s immune from self-deception.
Money and fame don’t lead to happiness; what leads to happiness is being loved and being lovely. Smith is scathing about fame and fortune; they should be kept in perspective. Pursue money and fame and recognition, but don’t be consumed by them; don’t make them your primary aim in life; keep being loved and lovely as your primary aims in life. The former is a means to an end (more money, fame, etc) but the latter is an end in itself. If you seek more money, you’ll never be satisfied; but if you seek to be lovely and loved, you’ll always be satisfied. So if material success is so destructive, why do people pursue it so? Because the world pays attention to rich and famous and powerful people, not to wise and virtuous people. Money and fame are therefore paths to being loved and noticed by others; but if they are pursued for their own sake, they lead to downfall because you’ll always need more and more and more; eventually there won’t be any more and you’ll be left with nothing, like searching for that first high.
But what is loveliness? Smith has two answers: the first is propriety (appropriate responses to those around you), meaning acting in the way that those around us expect and that allows them to interact with us in the way that we expect. We prefer harmony in out mutual sentiments to disharmony; what I really want is that your emotions harmonize with my own as I face tragedy or triumph. Behaving with propriety is the ability to conform to the expectations of those around us, and they in turn conform to our expectations. Propriety gains you the approval of those around you, but it’s not admired. For that, you need the second thing that makes you lovely, namely:
Virtue: this is multifaceted but refers to prudence, justice, and beneficence. Prudence means taking care of yourself, justice means not hurting others, and beneficence means being good to others.
HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER: A million things are the result of human action but not human design; what’s known as emergent order. Individual choices can lead to important social outcomes; each one of us created the moral society that we inhabit by the judgments that we make. Everyone, meaning no one in particular, decides what is proper and improper. How do norms emerge from our actions? Social feedback that we give and receive influences how we behave and how others behave in response to our reactions. We want to be around good people and we shun bad people. The virtues of courtesy and kindness and thoughtfulness and compassion and honour we celebrate; lying and stealing and meanness and spite we shun.
We all have two parts to play in maintaining civilization:
We need to be lovely even when we can get away with not being lovely;
We need to encourage others to behave well and dissuade bad behaviour.
As more and more of us take these steps, our seemingly negligible actions are no longer negligible. Through our actions, we create the norms and rules of what is attractive and unattractive. When you can trust the people you deal with, life is lovelier and economic life is much easier. It’s such an advantage to live in a society of high trust in public institutions; but it’s not easy to create trust. Being trustworthy doesn’t just lead to pleasant interactions. We’re all part of a system of norms and informal rules that is much bigger than ourselves; when we behave virtuously, we sustain that system. If you want to make the world a better place, work on being trustworthy, and honour those who are trustworthy.
However, you cannot make the world a better place if you are a man of the system: the leader with a scheme to remake society according to some master plan or vision. Such people fall in love with their vision of the ideal society and lose the ability to imagine any deviation from that perfection. Utopias can be dangerous and the world is so complicated that the small things we do in our everyday lives have a bigger impact than the political movements we join. Still want to make the world better? Talk to your kids, parents, smile at people, etc. Do the small things because these are the stuff of the good life.
How did Smith come to write two completely different books, namely the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments? The former deals with how we behave in a world of impersonal exchange, which is the world of strangers, and in the latter he deals with the fact that we care more about the people around us than we do about others who are farther away. Both books simply have a different focus; both books concern different spheres of human interaction; the personal (Sentiments) and the impersonal (Wealth). There’s a stark difference between the loving world of spouse and children, where everything is shared and cooperation is generated by love, and the less friendly world of work, where cooperation is generated by the potential for profit and the fear of loss. Our economic system has to be impersonal if it is to be deliver the life-transforming gifts of better health, music, etc. In a world of specialization, this is inevitable, but this is ok. Love locally, trade globally.