[SolarCross]

They also invented the 'complemtarity principle' of modern quantum mechanics first too. Fun fact: when Niels Bohr, the guy who came up with the standard 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum mechanics, was knighted by the Danish government for his contributions to science, he chose to place the Chinese yin-yang symbol in a prominent position on his coat of arms, to signify his intellectual debt to Chinese Taoism.

That was very gentlemanly of Niels Bohr to acknowledge his inspiration. It is the mark of the plagiarist to studiously fail to do this, clearly Bohr was better than that.

Dualist metaphysics is easy and it seems to fit as a model so well for so many things: hot vs cold, alive vs dead (cat!), strong vs weak, nadir vs zenith, friend vs foe.. and anything that is not of the extreme looks like graduations in between the extreme: warm is somewhere that is both of hot and cold, sick or wounded is both of alive and dead etc.

It is so easy, one might even say facile or specious, that those too much in love with dualism become like the man whose only tool is a hammer and so to whom all the world looks like a nail. Yet this metaphysics is a cypher that fails as a metaphysical model of far too much on scrutiny...

Let's take the temperature dialectic, hot vs cold. Is that all we need to model this phenomena? Actually no, really pressure and volume have something to say also. So for gases a better description will be this: PV=nRT and this is not a duality. How about phases of matter? How to make that a duality? Solid vs Fluid? Yet that doesn't capture the reality at all so we have to say there are four phases: solid, liquid, gas and plasma.

Let's consider friend vs foe. We can apply this dualism to everyone, everyone has friends and everyone has foes, so this dualism works for everyone? Except no because there are n entities each with x friends and y foes and each of those friends and foes are entities with different friends and different foes. Meaning really friend vs foe is not a duality but a plurality.

Marxists like to make a duality over social castes, they take the poly factional reality and make it into a dualism of proletariat vs bourgeoisie in their minds. Yet something as complex as society needs an n-dimensional model and indeed the classic indian model of society as poly-factional mix of warriors, priests, merchants, workers, and criminals while far more descriptive with its five vectors it is still too crude.

Diamat has the virtue of simplicity but the vice of wild inaccuracy. Hence the time has come for a polyist metaphysics to replace the lameness of diamat.

[SolarCross]

But Adam Smith's Utopia has come true in spades. Look at anything, life expectancy, health care, education, Britain in 2017 is a magical utopia compared to the eighteenth century. If Adam Smith was at fault he wasn't optimistic enough. What is underestimated is the human capacity for complaining.

Sure though the things you mention as being utopic are the sort of things Keynesians would readily claim as their own while the Smithians were rudely pushed out seeing as in Britain health and education are almost entirely nationalised since the late 19th century for education and the early-mid twentieth century for health.

The sort of elements of magical utopia that a Smithian (or Mises) would claim as examples of the invisible hand at work would be auto-mobiles, mobile phones, consumer electronics, computers, tourism, food, clothing and cultural products like pop music, films and video games.

[AFAIK]

What has changed beyond all recognition since Smith wrote that is the ease of communication and transport meaning the threshold for what can be made further afield is far lower.

People apply Smith's 'invisible hand' logic to almost all levels of the economy. But there are ample examples showing that state run services have better outcomes and lower costs than private sector ones. This is especially true in developing countries where the gov't is too weak and compromised (corrupt) to enforce rules and regulations on those who put profit over people. Even in the USA the banks are too big to fail and too big to jail.

Cities like London and NYC have spent huge sums of money rebuilding public transport infrastructure to make it more functional. Originally train companies were in direct competition with one another and built separate stations with inconvenient interchanges. Today these networks are designed to augment one another with interchange stations that allow passengers to access any train without leaving the network or buying a new ticket.

[AJS]

@AFAIK

I think Adam Smith is often attributed a zeal for free market economics and corporatism which isn't really supported by his writing. Wealth of Nations is far more analytical than prescriptive.

[Brother of Karl]

In retrospect, this whole process of globalisation now looks inevitable, given the nature of capitalism to expand its store of capital and to constantly seek new markets and new resources and labour-power to exploit.

Even so, this wouldn't have been seen as inevitable to an 18th century academic. You neglect to mention the role which technology has played in globalization, and the vast scale of infrastructure projects. In the 17th century when most international trade was done on fairly small (by our standards) sailing ships, which were dangerous, slow, and expensive. It simply didn't make sense to ship something to Europe from Africa or the Americas if they could produce it themselves. This is the very reason that Britain tried to prevent the American colonies from developing their own textile industry.

We live in a world in which all types of food are global commodities. In Smith's time, the only foods being shipped across national borders were dried psychoactives, like tea, coffee, and chocolate. How could he have imagined strawberries in New England markets grown in South America?

How could Smith have predicted city-sized container ships, or the Panama Canal, or the airplane, or even the automobile and highway system? How could he have even predicted instant, long distance communication? He died before the invention of the telegraph.

[Truth To Power]

What has changed beyond all recognition since Smith wrote that is the ease of communication and transport meaning the threshold for what can be made further afield is far lower.

No, what has changed even more is that domestic production must bear the burden of taxation, while overseas production can avoid it. In Smith's day, most government revenue came from land, and taxation thus could not be avoided by moving overseas. Today, land is a derisory revenue source and labor is heavily taxed; so to avoid taxation, firms try to produce where labor is cheaper and less taxed. The Wealth of Nations can best be understood as a single essay whose conclusion is that government should tax land rents, not labor or capital. Of course, Smith learned this at Turgot's knee.

[Rugoz]

The home bias is an empirical reality, in fact it is quite large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_home_bias_puzzle

Smith wasn't wrong, at least not entirely.

[quetzalcoatl]

Precisely. In other words, Smith failed to foresee the globalisation of the world economy. This process of globalisation has the effect that the "invisible hand" no longer guides the merchant or capitalist to promote the economic well-being of his or her own nation, but now guides him or her to promote the economic well-being of the world as a whole. In retrospect, this whole process of globalisation now looks inevitable, given the nature of capitalism to expand its store of capital and to constantly seek new markets and new resources and labour-power to exploit. And it is, in the broad sweep of history, a good thing - millions of people in the poorest parts of the world are now being lifted out of millennial poverty. But it means that capitalism is now in contradiction with the national interests of the developed nations, which were the historical heartland of global capitalism. This is why populist nationalists in those developed nations are now opposing the further development of global capitalism, either explicitly (in the case of the far right) or implicitly (in the case of Trump and Bannon, who are objectively now opposing capitalism while subjectively still supporting it). The next few decades will therefore be politically crucial - either the globalisation process will falter, due to a return to tariffs and protectionism, or the whole ideology of nationalism will falter and die in the developed nations, due to being completely outmoded by the natural development of the capitalist system. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the nation-state.

I believe the process of globalization has run its course. The cost of long supply lines, the complexity and vulnerability of just-in-time parts inventory, fossil fuel depletion means that moving goods long distances will be less and less feasible. Capitalists are running out of nations to outsource their labor. Japan has been too expensive for a long time. Likewise China. Once you have Bangladeshi pre-teens assuming your manufacturing duties, what's left? Starving Somali babes?

Geographic proximity has always been the most important trade variable. In the future, it will be virtually the only trade variable. New manufacturing techniques will abet localized production, fracturing the global system even further.

No global production means no global capital. Free movement of capital and goods over national borders will be irrelevant.

If nationalism falters, it will be supplanted by fragments of former nations not international capital.