Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to see such a large audience for this year's this year's Bestival lecture.
I am retired, obviously one of the directors of the Bestival Centre for the Enlightenment, along with Nicholas Cronk,
and I have the pleasure of welcoming David Hooton, who is one of the most stimulating, interesting and Wide-Ranging intellectual historians around.
It took me a very long time to recite all David's achievements, so I shall be extremely selective.
He is inversely professor of history at the University of York. He began by writing about the early modern atheism.
The very difficult subject for research was naturally, ethicists didn't publicise their views,
but that led to his first book about how Lusardi, the historian of the Council of Trent.
He ran a great deal of the history of political thought, especially Hobbs.
Most recently, he got into the history of science, a very fascinating and very eye-opening book called Bad Medicine, subtitled Doctors Doing Harm.
He's written a biography of Galileo and very recently, a huge book,
an absolutely fascinating book on the scientific revolution called The Invention of Science.
Recently out in paperback,
which I recommend as an absolutely fascinating read a lot of shows that David knows far more about science and technology than most art academics.
His next book. Will be based on the Carlisle lectures, which you gave.
In Oxford, I think two, three years ago, and some materials for that book will be will be presented now under the title.
Adam Smith Poverty and sending it over to you.
Thank you very much. This passing Woodford, and on the 6th of March 1795, he gathered for dinner with three guests and his niece,
and they had a couple of boiled chicken and pig's face, very good pea soup, a boil to ramp up beef, very fine.
A prodigious, fine, large and very fat cock turkey roasted macaroni batter, custard pudding with jelly,
apple fritters, tarts and raspberry puffs, dessert baked apples, nice nonpareil brandy, cherries and filbert.
Mr. Custom's, one of the guests we are told at very heartily.
There was plenty to to drink wines.
Port is multi-course, strong beer bottles, porter and so on, and I'm going to be returning to Parson Woodford and his dinner as we go along.
And you want to remember the 1795? That's a contemporary cookbook, and, of course, is the food was not served as a series of separate courses.
It was a big table with all these different dishes on it at once.
Many of you will have realised that my title is an implicit reference to a famous book by a March Assen entitled Poverty and Famines,
which appeared in 1981 and played an important part in winning him a Nobel prise for economics in 1998.
Sen is perhaps most famous.
Outside the world of development economics for having claimed that there has never been a famine in a democracy, a claim he made in 1991.
Poverty and famines, published a decade earlier, was directed against the view that what causes famines is simply and solely a shortage of food.
Sen argued that famines could occur when there was plenty of food if a group
within society lacked the ability to acquire that food by exchanging something,
whether it's labour or money for it. Famines were caused immediately by a failure of what he called exchange entitlements,
not by a simple failure of food availability sent analysed in particular the Bengal famine of 1943,
which had witnessed as a youngster in which more than two million people died.
And he argued that it was the result of a crisis, not of supply, but of demand, and thus argued that one could have,
in the words of the great Irish leader Daniel O'Connell speaking about the contemporary Irish famine in 1931.
Starvation in the midst of plenty. There's a big debate about whether Sen was right about the Bengal famine of 1943,
I don't think I'm not going to go into that debate and it doesn't matter for what I'm going to say.
His broader argument is what I'm going to rely on. Starvation in the midst of plenty.
You shouldn't be surprised, then, to learn the last person word for tucked into his dinner, the poor in his parish were on the point of starvation.
They were being supplied with subsidised brown bread and bread and coal.
It was a bitter winter and like spring, were occasionally delivered free to them,
paid for by collections in church on Sundays and the first months of 1795,
there were 72 bread riots in England and this in the next year a year which some would want to call years of famine.
Though they are perhaps better described in the careful words of John posted as years of terrible shortages marked by pockets of starvation.
How should we respond to the juxtaposition of Woodford's generous dinners and the near starvation of his parishioners?
In 1955, his editor, John Beresford, remarked, Fortunately for the poor,
the founder of eighteenth century charity seems to have flowed with generous freedom,
and bread and coal were given for many months, swapped squalor, customs and Parson Woodford, each subscribing £10 to the General Collection.
He describes the charitable stream as flowing freely on all and every occasion of distress.
The great socialist historian David Thomson, on the other hand, took a more cynical view.
Remarking that Woodford, who suffered horribly from gout,
had been crippled by an excess of rich food but nevertheless did not flinch before his continuing duty to his own dinner.
Thompson's comment comes in an essay which is perhaps even more famous than Sen's book,
entitled The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th century and published in past and present in 1971.
Thompson's essay argues that riots in the 18th century were not random or disorderly acts of violence.
Restaurants were directed at performing the function previously performed by the magistrate
of ensuring that grain flour and bread were brought to market and sold at a fair price.
Branches would often take over a baker's shop, sell the bread at the traditional price and leave the money collected behind them when they left.
Riots often resulted in interventions by the local establishment to subsidise or free to distribute bread.
Hannah Moore wrote a poem discouraging riots.
Her views are expressed by Jack Anvil, who resolves So I'll work the whole day, and on Sundays, I'll seek at church about all the wants of the week.
The gentle folks who will afford us supplies, they'll subscribe and they'll give up their puddings and pies,
though, as we've seen Parson Woodford had not given up his puddings and pies.
Thompson's essay is famous for introducing the concept of a moral economy, sends book for introducing the concept of exchange entitlements.
Both believe that hunger is a political problem. That Thompson's preferred solution is socialism and sentence is democracy.
Both are concerned with the urgent need to redistribute resources to the poorest.
At times of crisis, whether that crisis originates in the failure of the harvest or in a failure of incomes to keep up with prices.
This lecture addresses a topic on which Senator Thompson would have been unable to agree.
Thompson So Adam Smith, a summarising and codifying a hard faced and hard hearted commitment to a laissez faire approach to the grain market,
which was to lead eventually the arguments of Edmund Burke on the horrors of the Great
Irish famine of 1845 252 to what Michel Foucault called the policy of laissez moodier.
Sand has always emphasised the ways in which Smith was sympathetic to the needs of the poor,
and since the 1990s is co-author to whom he is related by the accident of marriage,
Emma Rothschild has argued extensively that Smith properly understood was a radical rather than a conservative.
At the end of 1795 that year again, Smith was invoked by those calling for a minimum wage as a solution to hunger.
At a time when the day's wages of a labourer would not buy a balilo for Balilo being a great step down,
of course, from a Wheaton life, one passage in Smith was seised on both then and now.
Smith said that when wages are regulated, it is to benefit employers so that when occasionally one does find a regulation which benefits employees,
it is always, he said, just an equitable. An example he gives is requiring wages to be paid in money, not goods.
Payment in goods often involving cheating.
Smith was not saying that any possible regulation of wages to benefit employees is a good thing, which is often what he described as saying.
He merely said that in the England of his day, where the ruling class, as we might posit, legislated for its own behalf.
Any legislation that you came across which favoured the employees was remarkably just inequitable and extremely unusual.
Despite the efforts of Rothschild, while can't find in Smith an argument for a legislated minimum wage.
According to Rothschild. Only with the publication in 18:00 of Edmund Burke thoughts and details on scarcity,
originally written in 1795 to six again the same year did a mistaken hardline free market reading of Smith become established.
And the question of the relationship between Smith and book on the subject of famine is one to which I will be returning.
The 19th century reading of Smith is, Rothschild has argued, a mistaken reading.
Smith, like Sand and Thompson, would have had no difficulty in recognising the need to intervene to break a famine.
My topic is Adam Smith on poverty and famine, and my task is to choose between two views of Smith,
one which sees him as a hard hearted spokesperson for a market which unchecked allows the poor to starve in the midst of plenty,
and the other which sees him as a defender of the poor, especially when faced with famine.
Before we proceed, let me sketch in a bit of background. The most sophisticated economic theory before the publication of the wealth of nations
in 1776 was that of a fizzy occurrence and Smith refers to as the economists,
the fizzy currents had campaigned endlessly for free trade in grain,
and there had been a long process of liberalisation of the grain trade in France, beginning in 1754.
Prior to that, there had been restrictions on the movement of grain between provinces,
imposed prices and other extensive forms of interference with the market.
In 1776, the French government abandoned the new free trade policies in the face of bad harvests and popular protests,
a crucial attack on the free trade was the publication of the dialogues of Fernando Galliani in 1770,
a work which had an immediate and extraordinary success and a profound cultural impact.
It's from editing those dialogues by his friend Galliani that I was supposed to have learnt how to write dialogues himself in England in Smith's day.
There was a bounty on the export of corn in normal years,
and this was intended to encourage production and thus provide a buffer and years of bad harvest within the country.
There was, in principle, a complete free trade. This very brief summary introduces the following points.
First, the question of whether there should be a free trade in grain was not a marginal issue.
It was a central issue for the new political economy. The economy of the physio crats and Smith as a successor to them.
Second, the question was a burning question when Smith was writing the wealth of Nations published in 1776.
The Bad Harvest of 1774 was not only a crisis in France,
where it led to the abandonment of the ocratic policies, but also in England, where there were food riots.
Smith was actively engaged with the subject when he was writing. He was not just repeating platitudes or views he'd formed in the past.
Smith refers to the wealth of nations to a French book published in 1775 in Defence of Free Trade,
and he had in his library another book published in November of 1774.
Although it bears the date, 1770 1770 had been held up by the census until November 1774,
a reply to Galliani, although there is no evidence that Smith read Galliani himself.
He certainly responds to the arguments of Galliani in the wealth of nations.
That's the contract is very much on Smith's mind when he wrote the book.
And on the minds of his first readers when they read it,
Smith's discussion of the subject is entitled A Digression concerning the corn trade and corn laws.
Calling the discussion a digression signalled his distance from the physio Krantz,
for whom the topic lay at the core of that whole intellectual system.
But in policy terms, Smith's views were identical with those of the physician krauts,
and he would have expected this to be evident to every informed reader.
Now, there are several difficulties in trying to understand how to interpret Smith's view of famine.
But the first is straightforward. Smith believed all famines are made by governments he believed and I quote in an extensive corn
country between all the different parts of which there was a free commerce and communication,
the scarcity occasioned by the most unfavourable seasons can never be so great as to produce a famine.
And the scanty crop, if managed with frugality and economy,
will maintain through the year the same number of people that are commonly fed in a more affluent manner by one of moderate plenty.
When Smith talks about corn, he presumably means in the first place wheat,
but also oats and barley oats were corn in Scotland in the north of England because corn was the word used for the main GrainCorp in any region.
Smith's claim is that harvest failure is never the cause of famine in any large country, practising free trade within its borders.
Even leaving aside the possibility of imports from abroad. Indeed, he says, a famine has never arisen from any other cause.
But the violence of government attempting by improper means to remedy the inconveniences of a dearth, a dearth being a period of scarcity.
You notice that the emphasis on on large countries as opposed to small ones,
that was a concession to Galliani had discussed at length what he thought the situation of Geneva was.
And then having made an exception for small countries,
Galliani had then applied the same exception to frontier provinces and then to provinces next to frontier provinces,
and he'd run a slippery slope argument by which in the end,
every society was just like Geneva and every society needed to control its contract in the same way that Geneva did.
Smith allows part of that argument and steps away from the slippery slope.
We need to put Smith's claim that harvest failures never caused famines in context.
First, Smith is talking about what he calls corn, not about rice or potatoes.
He specifically says that rice may be an exception, and it was a well established argument, then a country as diverse as England.
A dry year will be good for the crops in some parts of the country. A wet year will be good for crops in another.
Thus, the effects of the weather tend to balance out. Smith realised that this might not apply in rice growing countries,
and he had little interest in potatoes and most certainly not to know that they were much more prone to disease than grain crops.
Potato blight to bring the cause of the Great Irish famine and that stored potatoes,
unlike grain, are destroyed by frost as they were in Ireland in 1740.
But his claim that harbours failures did not cause famines was basically sound.
There was no occasion in Smith's lifetime when two back-to-back Maoists were more than 20 percent below the average in
yield and an individual harvest falling more than 20 percent below the average only occurred once every 20 years or so.
Over the previous centuries, the difference in yields between good years and bad years have been slowly and steadily diminishing.
The weather was much less of a threat than it had once been,
partly presumably because of improved agricultural techniques and surely also because of increased dependence,
because increased dependence on the market had encouraged specialisation so that poor and unsuitable soil was no longer used to grow grain crops,
but had been turned over to pasture. Moreover, both national and international markets had become steadily more integrated,
ensuring the supplies were spread more efficiently across the globe.
This extraordinary graph, using London as its reference point, shows how from seven 1840 through to 1795,
the markets of the world moved towards each other in the price of grain and then joined the French Revolution.
After 1795, they moved sharply apart and then in the 19th century, they moved very rapidly towards once.
But you've got the railways and you've got steamboats very rapidly towards a common position.
National and international markets have become steadily more integrated. The problem, of course, is that prices were much more volatile than supplies.
Smith himself provides figures show that the price of wheat tripled between 1796 and 1799 and halved between 1740 and 1743.
So 25 per cent movement in supply led to a doubling or tripling of price.
Smith massively underestimated the risk of famine within a free market economy, but one can see why he might be tempted to do so.
One basic reason for his underestimating the risk was that there had been no significant famine in England for more than a century.
But what are improper means, he said, I'm quoting the violence of government attempting by improper means to remedy the inconveniences of a death.
Smith certainly had in mind the magistrate, forcing merchants to bring grain to market or imposing a fair price upon them.
Both measures would be bound to discourage new suppliers being brought into a regional state,
with such measures were being imposed and thus would have the opposite of the intended effect.
Smith directly criticises the bread riots described by Thompson,
and one can see why he would hold such interventions were liable within a market economy to be counterproductive.
But Smith goes well beyond an attack on the old moral economy of the just price.
He argues that the interest of the corn merchant and other population are identical.
He says it is the corn merchants interest to raise the price of corn as high as the real scarcity of the season requires,
and it can never be as interest to raise it higher by raising the price, he discourages the consumption and puts everybody more or less.
But particularly the inferiore ranks of people upon thrift and good management.
In other words, according to Smith, the market price should always be accepted as if it were the right price,
I say as if it were because he is very aware that the market price is often the wrong price doesn't matter.
It's the only price that you should rely on.
It is important to note that the whole of Smith's digression on the corn trade is directed at what we might call the old moral economy,
which sought to set maximum prices on false corn merchants to bring corn to market.
He makes no mention of what we might call the new model on the economy, the moral economy of Parson Woodford of subsidies and subscriptions.
Though this moral economy had been in existence at least since 1740 in 1757,
one Bristol Parish alone supplied twelve thousand pounds of cheap bread to 700 families.
In 1766, the city's merchant ventures purchased 6000 or 6000 bushels of wheat and Doncic to ensure supplies.
While the principal gentlemen of Norwich promised to raise £8000 to import corn from abroad,
it's possible to draw up a very long list of employees is ascribed usually £50 or £100 each in 1766 to subsidise or distribute free ride.
Particularly because it was a way of buying the next election.
It's essential here to distinguish between poor relief and the new moral economy legislation authorised
local authorities to tax householders in order to pay for the relief of the unemployed and the unemployable.
These taxes fell on the wealthy, but also on those with modest incomes who could ill afford to pay them in years of high food prices.
Subsidies and charitable distributions were quite different.
They were funded by voluntary contributions and thus were not based on taxation and do not represent a form of state intervention.
And they primarily benefited not those on poor relief, but those whose wages were too low for them to be able to afford bread, Smith discusses.
Poor relief is critical of it because the poor have to be relieved in their home parish and are consequently prevented from moving in search of work.
Smith was a great get on your bicycle sort of person if the bicycle had existed at the time.
On the subject of charity, however, Smith is mysteriously silent and that silence the preoccupies me.
Or rather, to be Frank Smith, implies that charity is unnecessary.
He compares the corn merchant to the master of a ship which is becalmed at sea with supplies running low.
The corn merchant acting out of self-interest happens to treat the people.
As I quote, the prudent master of a vessel is sometimes obliged to treat his crew when he foresees that provisions are likely to run short.
He puts them upon short allowance. Though from excessive caution, he should sometimes do this without any real necessity.
Yet all the inconveniences which his crew can thereby suffer are inconsiderable in comparison of the danger,
misery and ruin to which they might sometimes be exposed by less provident conduct.
We should trust the con merchant not because he is deliberately acting to protect us from starvation,
but because he is simply the agent of impersonal market forces and the
information in the market is superior to the information held by any individual.
But of course, on a ship, rations can be handed out equally in real life.
There is no such equality. Smith distracts our attention from this basic fact by sleight of hand.
The corn merchant he writes by raising the price of corn discourages the consumption and puts everybody more or less,
particularly the inferior ranks of people upon thrift and good management.
In his example of the captain on his ship, all the crew are presumably not all the officers are treated the same.
But, of course, in real life, everyone isn't in the same boat.
Some keep their jobs. Others lose them. Some have friends and family to whom they can turn.
Others do not. Some have children to feed. Others do not.
Some have a cottage garden from which to supplement their diet. Others do not.
In the Burmese famine of 1943, the death toll amongst women was much higher than amongst men in the Dutch hunger winter of 1944 to 1945.
Every effort was made to equalise rations as if the German occupied Netherlands really were ship at sea.
It was the elderly men who died. Famine does not come for everybody.
More or less it comes hand in hand with disease. It takes away one person and it leaves another.
Prices may be a form of rationing. No form of rationing can be fair because the circumstances of human beings vary.
Prices are a particularly unfair form of rationing because different people have different financial resources and other resources,
such as market gardens. Now, Kalyani understood this in his dialogues.
He has his spokesperson argue against someone who thinks, as Smith does answer.
I see that you do not yet know what a famine is. You think a famine is a universal catastrophe.
You are mistaken in a famine. Everyone suffers as a result of a catastrophe, which strikes individuals one by one.
During a famine, the rich, the well-to-do do not suffer and grain merchants even benefit, but all shudder at the sight of the most dreadful spectacle.
One sees people dying of hunger. The impact of this is powerful because it is a response to the sight of the most cruel suffering.
The catastrophe of a famine strikes a small number, but empathy ensures that all suffer even the hardest.
Hearts are touched.
One single person dying of hunger in the street makes a whole town full of people who have dined, well, sad and throws them into a state of despair.
Giuliani understood perfectly well that people can be dying of hunger in a town
where most people have dined well instead of there being rationing for all.
For some, there is life nearly as normal for others. Death by starvation.
Let's imagine for a moment that Smith had turned his mind to those who donated bread to the poor or subsidised the price of bread.
Those, like Parson Woodford,
one might think that that behaviour could be compared to a petty officer bank behind the prudent masters back and handing out extra rations.
He might, meanwhile, but he would not be helping.
This, you might think, is precisely the less provident conduct that is liable to lead to danger, misery and ruin.
Arguments such as this were used to justify non-intervention in the 19th century.
But Smith would not. I think if he had thought about the matter, have reached this conclusion.
For there is no prudent master in the market, which is the market which sets the price.
So when charitable subscribers buy bread to distribute to the poor or subsidise bread, what they do is push up the price of bread in the market.
The corn dealers, knowing how much they have in stock, will not allow their supplies to be used up all at once,
but will raise the price until other purchases drop out. Buying less or giving up altogether.
In other words, what the new political economy, the new moral economy does.
What charity does is spread the need for what Smith calls thrift and good management.
More widely, it makes rationing fairer.
It reduces the pressure on the poorest and increases the pressure on the middling sort, the donations of people like Parson Woodford.
We're not undermining the market's role in rationing supply.
They were simply making the nation more like a ship in which rations were doled out equally.
Smith ought to welcomed that new moral economy. Moreover, in his chapter on wages, Smith had provided a very careful account of how in years of death,
when food prices rise, wages do not rise to keep up.
Rather, they fall as food prices rise, expenditure on non-food items falls.
People stop buying shoes and dresses and so on. Servants are laid off.
Craftsmen and shopkeepers lay off their employees and eventually they go bust.
As the numbers of unemployed grow, wages naturally fall as a quite straightforward scissors effect.
As food prices rise, wages go down.
What we are looking at here is precisely precisely the sorts of process analysed by a march to send a failure of exchange entitlements.
Is there a limit to this process? Smith says that in the end, the floor for wages is set by what he calls common humanity,
a phrase he uses three times in the chapter on wages but does not use anywhere else in any of his other writings.
Employers want their workers to survive from one year to the next.
But wages were set each year at Michaelmas,
just after the main wheat harvest and long before it was possible to predict how prices would move in the coming year.
And Smith was well aware that masters and years of death drove as hard a bargain as they could.
This is what he says, masters of all sorts, therefore frequently make better bargains with their servants India than in cheap
years and find them more humble and dependent in the former than in the latter.
The floor for wages is bound to be low and may quickly prove to be too low when prices start to rise.
Now, common humanity is precisely what drove past and Woodford's donations to the poor.
Grants and subsidies were more attractive than raising wages, and not just because it might be difficult to lower wages once they've been raised.
Shopkeepers, craftsmen and small farmers could easily have been broken if they'd been forced to pay
higher wages just as easily as if they'd been forced to pay higher up higher poor rates.
Woodford, on the other hand, because easily afford his donations out of his vast income of £400 a year,
grants and subsidies had the same effect as higher wages without as higher wages would have done, forcing an increase in unemployment.
They improved the exchange entitlements of the employed poor without reducing the number in employment.
But precisely at the point where he invokes common humanity, Smith fails to ask how this humanity ought to express itself.
He fails to discuss charity. He fails to discuss grants and subsidies.
That was an alternative to grants and subsidies, and that was make work projects during the desert.
The dearth or famine of 1771 to 1773. The French economist Togo, who was a free trader and had been appointed entend of the limousine,
used government funds to feed the impotent poor, but the able bodied poor, including women and children.
He set to work on road building so they could earn a living at a time when many weapons thrown out of work.
Emma Rothschild thinks that Smith would have approved such projects, although he never, ever says that government should intervene to create jobs.
There is no evidence that Smith would have thought this a proper means of remedying the problem of unemployment during a
dearth of such schemes paid out of taxation would have the same stifling consequences for economic activity as poor relief.
Now, you may want to say now that I am wondering from the point I persist in discussing famine,
forgetting that Smith insists that it is interference of the market which causes famine.
His central claim is that if there is no interference with the market, there will be no famine deaths caused.
What he gently causes calls, inconveniences, inconveniences which the people can suffer, he says, from high prices.
They are not to be confused with famine. In the first place, Smith knew that this was to understate the problem.
He knew that, as he puts it, years of death are generally amongst the common people years of sickness and mortality.
He discussed how the children of the poor tend to die because their parents cannot feed them or care for them properly.
In the Highlands of Scotland, he remarked, it is common for a woman to have 20 children, only two of whom survive to adulthood.
Smith knew perfectly well that the greatest inconvenience here,
but death was the increased mortality amongst children and the old calling this an inconvenience.
He is, I think, an abusive language, and it's important to recognise that while Smith calls it orders on what others would call a famine.
It's helpful here to compare Smith's language with that of Sir James Stewart, who was also a free trader and who published a decade before Smith.
Stewart at least gave some thought to the inconveniences of a death.
It is far from being true. He says the same number of people consume always the same quantity of food and years of plenty.
Everyone is well fed. The price of the lowest industry can procure subsistence sufficient to bear a division.
Food is not so frugal. He managed a quantity of animals, a facet for use.
All sorts of cattle are kept in good heart and people drink more, largely because all is cheap.
A year of scarcity comes the people are ill fed,
and when the lower classes come to divide with their children, the portions are brought to be very small.
There is great economy upon consumption. Few animals are fattened for use.
Cattle look miserably and a poor man cannot indulge himself with a cup of general sale.
Smith also knew or should have known that his cheerful claim that famine could
be dismissed by political economists as the result of government meddling.
Was open to dispute. In fact, it was simply false.
In 1740 to 42, approximately 10 percent of the Irish population,
some 300000 people died of famine and of famine related disease deaths were heavily concentrated in Munster.
What 20 percent may have died? This is a sort of Thompson contract.
It's a written by the populous have dumped Dublin defending their insurrection against the grain traders and the bakers.
But I want to quote from the grounds of Ireland.
Sir, the author says, I have been absent from this country for some years and on my return to it last time,
I found it the most miserable scene of universal distress that I've ever read off in history, wanton misery and every face.
The rich unable almost as they were willing. I'm going to read that a second time because I don't know how to read it.
The rich unable almost as they were willing to relieve the poor.
If as that means, if for what it means, the rich,
unable almost as they were willing to relieve the poor, the roads spread to the dead and dying bodies,
mankind of the colour of the docks and nettles which they are fed on two or three,
sometimes more on a car going to the grave for one to Barrows to carry them.
And many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished. This universal scarcity was interviewed by fluxes and malignant fevers,
which swept multitudes of all sorts whole villages or laid waste by wanton sickness and death in various shapes and scarce and house.
The whole island escaped from tears and mourning. Smith was surely aware of the desperate situation in Ireland caused by recurring famines,
but he had on his bookshelves two sets of the complete works of Jonathan Swift, who has a good claim to being Smith's favourite contemporary author.
He thus had two copies of Swift's modest proposal of 1729.
1729 was, of course, a famine year.
I expect many of you are familiar with that work in which with its graphic account of how the poor of Ireland were so reduced to
the utmost extremes of want that it would be sensible for them to sell their children as livestock to be butchered and eaten.
Swift writes, I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young,
healthy child well nursed is that a year old and most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether the stewed or roasted, baked or boiled?
You can imagine the Parson's meal, can't you?
And I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragu.
A child will make two dishes and entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone,
the four hind quarter will make a reasonable dish and seasoned with a little pepper.
Salt would be very good oiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
I grant this food will be somewhat dear and therefore very proper for landlords who, as they have already devoured.
Most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.
Now, one thing is immediately apparent to a reader of the modest proposal and of accounts of the famines of 1720 to 21,
17, 28, 29 and 17 40 to 42 people did not starve in Ireland because there was no food.
They starved because they could not pay for the food that was available in the markets.
Swift solution After all, it's not that they should be given food,
but that they should be given an income through the sale of their children and in the worst years of famine.
Relief was provided sometimes a soup, but also in the form of money or delayed collection of rents or make work schemes.
In one case, the building of an enormous obelisk. Smith claims to have made a careful study of European famines over the last two centuries.
I've searched around to find what he'd been reading. There is, I think, only one book that remotely fits the bill.
It's not in his library, so we can't be sure, but I think it has to be this report.
Obey's factors, which have made for high grain prices in France and England of 1768,
a hardline free market to track it's a very simple fact that all the tracks about the contract and famine in Smith's library,
a hard line free market trends.
It just seems very likely that Smith's reading have been largely confined to the history of famine in England and France,
and that he had made no careful study of Ireland. What the mighty have said to explain Irish famines, particularly the devastating famine of 1740 42.
Now, one might argue that Ireland was not an extensive corn country,
but I can't see that argument being taken seriously because Ireland had excellent transport connexions with England
and the English had no ban on the export of grain in those years so that Ireland size large smaller in between.
However you want to classify it would seem to be irrelevant. One might argue that the Irish famine was caused by government intervention.
But there was virtually no government intervention. At one point, they finally banned the export of grain.
That's all they government to do. So why did the Irish start?
The modern answer is that a major factor was the absence of any institutionalised system of poor relief in Ireland.
Absentee landlords were relatively uninterested in contributing to subscriptions.
There were no communities gathered around the parish church, as in Parson Woodford's England.
Smith himself emphasised the plight of the Irish, whose economy was misshapen as a result of their colonial relationship to England,
and his ruling class were particularly hard hearted because of the religious differences that came between landlords and their tenants.
He describes the relationship between Irish landlords and their tenants as grounded.
I quote in the most odious of all distinctions those of religious and political prejudices distinctions which more
than any other and make both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed,
and which commonly render the inhabitants of the same country more hostile to one another than those of different countries are.
The best solution Smith thought for the situation of Ireland was a union with England and Scotland on the model of the Anglo Scottish Union of 1787,
which he believed had liberated the poor in Scotland from the oppression of their landlords as well.
So here's the problem Ireland in 1740 to 42 starved.
Not because of a bad harvest or two, but because of the insolent oppression of its English speaking landlords,
because of the absence of poverty and of the new moral economy. England, on the other hand, in the dreadful famine years of 1795 to 96,
avoided starvation very largely because it had poor relief and it had what I'm calling the new moral economy.
Smith was wrong. The market alone was not a solution to the problem of famine.
And if he had paid attention to Ireland, he would have seemed that he was wrong.
Of course, you might say if the Irish have been fed, someone else would have had to go without.
And since the Irish starved someone else could be fed, the English in 1740 to 42 were busy subsidising prices and making grants to the poor.
A really hard line, Smithson would surely argue that this may have saved English lives,
but only at the expense of Irish lives for grain, which would otherwise have been available for export to Ireland remained in England.
Smith himself recognises that countries are bound to be competing amongst each other when supplies are limited.
Arguably, relief in England did not actually work.
It simply exported starvation from England to Ireland. It is the Irish who paid the price for English interference with the market.
So to one mobile, want to argue with regards to Togo's make work schemes and the limits on that?
The gains in one province must surely have been made at the expense of its neighbours,
and if few starved in the limousine, more must have starved elsewhere.
That argument might have some merit, I'm. It's an unpleasant argument, but unpleasant arguments are sometimes true.
It can't follow that Togo or even and Woodford were at fault.
Surely not to blame for the inaction of others. And Smith was right.
Even in bad years, that was enough to go around if it was distributed fairly.
In the course of this lecture, we have looked at three approaches to poverty, death and famine.
The exchange entitlements approach of how much and where famine occurs,
when people are priced out of the market, the moral economy approach of it with Thomson,
where markets should be made subservient to the needs of the people and the
laissez faire approach of Adam Smith's digression on the contract where famines,
we are assured, will never occur if the markets are allowed to operate unchecked.
I have argued I hope persuasively that attempts to read Adam Smith, as if he shared Sen's views are deeply implausible for Smith,
had nothing to say about improving the exchange entitlements of the poor.
Though he understood exactly how in times of death, exchange entitlements of death, exchange entitlements are eroded and eliminated.
Nevertheless, he failed even to mention the new moral economy of subsidies and subscriptions.
He failed to ask himself why there were famines in Ireland.
He failed to acknowledge the extent of the inconveniences suffered by the poor in years of death.
Instead, when it came to the corn trade, he simply repeated the arguments that the physio crats,
although their policies had already failed in France, he never bothered to read, I think, the key attack on their arguments Galliani stomachs.
On the profoundly important subject of poverty and famine,
I think there is no way of defending Smith for the simple reason that he failed to address the issue of starvation in the midst of plenty.
He had to hand all the components of an exchange entitlement theory,
but he failed to assemble those components and failed to acknowledge the inadequacy of the arguments of the physical acts which he had inherited.
Why, what went wrong? The key to answering this question, I think,
is to compare Smith's digression with Edmund Burke's thoughts on scarcity written during the crisis of 1795 to six,
with which I began the crisis, with which I began this lecture and published during the next subsistence crisis in Hs300.
Buck runs a straightforward free market argument. With one crucial exception,
he acknowledges that the wages of labourers may sink so low that it becomes impossible for them to feed themselves and their families.
He's against a minimum wage or controls on the grain market.
What then, is the solution? The answer of the only possible answer if you take this position is charity.
Let compassion be shown in action, he writes. The more the better.
According to every man's ability, without all doubt, Charity to the poor is a direct.
And obligatory duty upon all Christians and is this charity, which he believes has warded off famine.
I got a. Read again, a passage where there's a richness, which I don't quite know how to read, but we'll see.
Even now, he says in November of 1895. I do not know of one man, woman or child that has perished from famine.
Fewer, if any, I believe, than in years of plenty when such a thing may happen by accident.
This is owing to a care and superintendence of the poor, far greater than any I can remember.
Why didn't Smith invoke charity in this book and the way?
The reasons I think are obvious for Smith's claim was that free market policies would lead to general prosperity.
He says the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security
is so powerful a principle that it is alone and without any assistance capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity.
Burke did not believe in general prosperity. He was prepared to acknowledge that poverty was, as he believed,
an irremediable aspect of the human condition so he could acknowledge the need for charity.
Where Smith could not second, Smith's claim was that the hidden hand, as he called it,
ensured that individuals pursuing their own selfish interests served the general good,
that there was a natural congruence between market forces and public welfare.
His account of how at times of death wages are eroded and unemployment is spread simply didn't fit into this story.
He makes no mention of it in his optimistic account of how the market is only benevolent consequences in the distribution of grain.
He can't afford to address the issue of exchange entitlements without bringing into question the providential scheme,
which underpins the whole argument of the wealth of nations. The extent to which Smith's whole argument is providential is disputed,
but I'm I'm persuaded by those who suggest he can't face the fact that a benevolent God would not
have designed the world in which we find ourselves where people starve in the midst of plenty.
This was no problem for Burke, who believed in original sin, which provided him with a satisfactory explanation.
Thirdly, Burke knew that his arguments had profound implications for moral philosophy.
And off, he remarked, had not fully grasped the extent of the obligation to charity when he described it as a duty of imperfect obligation.
Burke responded by saying that one can take pleasure in the fact that one has control over when, where, how and to whom.
One exercise is charity, but one is fully obliged to perform acts of charity.
It's a duty of perfect obligation. Chun dismiss wealth of nations,
and you will find no similar emphasis on an obligation for the better off to come to the assistance of their less fortunate neighbours.
When Smith writes about sympathy, he does not mean the sort of sympathy which leads one to share the sufferings of
one's neighbours and the wealth of nations and the theory of moral sentiments.
Ferguson said that it was an abuse of language. That's where I caught this phrase abusive language, Ferguson said.
And it was by an abusive language that Smith said that he felt sympathy with the man who pays his bills on time.
In other words, we approve of him. We think well of him. That's what Smithy and sympathy largely is.
I'm sure Smith thought well of those who gave money to charitable purposes,
but he was far from presenting charity as a perfect obligation in writing about famine.
Smith faced a test. He knew the subject was important, and so he gave it considerable thought.
He did a great deal of research, but he failed the test and he found it not just in one way, but in four separate and distinct ways.
He got his facts wrong. He forgot about Ireland. He got his emotions wrong.
He failed to empathise with the suffering. He got his theory wrong.
He failed to recognise that a country is not like a ship at sea because it contains people of wildly varied circumstances and conditions.
And he got his morality wrong. He fails to consider the obligation to charity.
Why? Because he was wedded to a system to use a phrase he himself was soon to use in the last edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
He was, in the end, a man of system.
I don't want to go too far in defending book for I've always thought of myself as being on the side of pain of Wollstonecraft and indeed of Smith.
I'm rather shocked to find that I've written a lecture in support of book but book for all
his faults and failings at a much better understanding of poverty and famine than Smith did.
And this may well have had something to do with the fact the book was Irish.
He was 11, 12, 13 years old during the dreadful hunger years of 1740 to 42 and surely saw the dead and the near dead just as there an unspoken,
unacknowledged personal experience at the heart of immature ascends.
Great book on famine. So too, there must be the very same experience at the heart of books.
OK, had been there, unlike Smith,
he had seen with his own eyes what Kalyani describes the people dying of hunger who can be seen wandering in the streets, spectres, hideous skeletons.
His skin is burnt red with bleary eyes and then covered with sores and vermin.
You see them approach you with a shuffling gait, asking in a horse whisper and with trembling hand for a piece of bread.
And sometimes the moment you try to help them, you see them fall at your feet and die in the dirt.