One of my favorite niche economics blogs is Gavin Kennedy's Adam Smith's Lost Legacy. Many of his posts go after people using Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor. He tirelessly points out that Smith used the metaphor only twice in The Wealth of Nations, and on neither occasion was it used to describe the economics in the way attributed to Smith by economists in the second half of the Twentieth Century. But his larger concern is rampant illiteracy about Smith, but also about our economic past in general. He recently encountered someone who wants to replace the "invisible hand" with the "invisible heart." Here is part of his response in his post Need for Historical Perspective on Poverty.
... It seems to be another blueprint to save the world from the only phenomenon called 'capitalism' that has raised millions from poverty to standards of living beyond anything achieved in previous millennia, including the frightful poverty experiences of Soviet-style communism.
Much of the ancient curse of poverty persists in large geographical spaces of the world affecting billions of people, though the total numbers living on $1 a day has diminished at an historical high also by a billion or so since the 1960s. The poor in the richer countries have lower standards than the very rich, but those poor are incomparably richer than the richest minority living in the millennia before the change from agriculture and primitive commercial markets, including the richest Emperors, Kings, War Lords and Conquerors. I
It would help if those who seek to "tackle the problem of poverty" for the very best of humanitarian reasons, like Terry Hallman and Sir Ronald Cohen, and many others, would get some historical perspectives on the relative scale of human poverty over the last 1,000 years. ...
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