The East Asian Miracle: Where Did Adam Smith Go Wrong?
To explain economic development, the starting point is often Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which is taken to explain almost all modern economic growth. The long-standing Smithian paradigm, which posits that the development of trade and the division of labor unfailingly bring about economic growth, continues to provide the dominant foundations of most economic development theories. Smith attributed economic growth to a “natural propensity” in human nature to maximize wealth or what he called […]