Sublime

By the eighteenth century, a new ideology was taking form, especially in Britain, that “greed is good” (to use a recent summary formulation), because greed spurs a society’s efforts and inventiveness. By giving vent to greed, the logic goes, societies can best harness the insatiable ambitions, great energies and ingenuity of their citizens. While

Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument.3 God—or Divine Providence, as he put it—had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided “as if by an invisible hand” to promote the general welfare.

basics. The economy, whether in Europe or the US, is an enormous collection of arrangements and institutions and technologies and human actions, buying and selling and investing and exploring and strategizing. It’s a huge hive of activity, where the individual behavior of agents—banks, consumers, producers, government departments—leads to aggregate

“Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,”