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Since we are talking about the UK, as Adam Smith said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but f

Since we are talking about the UK, as Adam Smith said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.“

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Grustaf 5y ago
I don't know if Adam Smith meant it in the sense that present day libertarians and other naive people take it, but I am sure nobody would want to shop from a psychopathic butcher that only cares about profits.
- indigochill 5y ago
  But what would that look like in Adam Smith's time? Suppose there was a butcher known to be a psychopath who people would really rather not buy from. Given the relatively low barrier to entry of being an 18th-century butcher (relative to many of our large industries today), someone could enter the market and just not be a psychopath and take all that guy's business because people would prefer shopping there. Knowing this, then from a purely game-theoretical perspective, the psychopathic butcher would realize that if he wanted to be competitive in his village, he should probably dial the psychopathy back. An alternative would be to outright attack competition, but before the industrial revolution he probably wouldn't have enough of a leg up on challengers to afford that. Arguably that has changed since, where incumbents benefiting from economies of scale have much greater advantage over new competitors and therefore have less to fear from bad behavior (see basically the history of labor post-industrial revolution). Incumbents do still get disrupted, but for some reason virtually never on ethical differentiation.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    If they knew he was a psychopath, they wouldn't shop from him, regardless of behaviour. And that's my point. Self-interest is obviously not enough to sustain a successful society, it's only really enough when combined with all the unwritten rules of common decency in society, and I'm sure that's how Adam Smith meant it too.

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Grustaf 5y ago

I don't know if Adam Smith meant it in the sense that present day libertarians and other naive people take it, but I am sure nobody would want to shop from a psychopathic butcher that only cares about profits.

indigochill 5y ago
But what would that look like in Adam Smith's time? Suppose there was a butcher known to be a psychopath who people would really rather not buy from. Given the relatively low barrier to entry of being an 18th-century butcher (relative to many of our large industries today), someone could enter the market and just not be a psychopath and take all that guy's business because people would prefer shopping there. Knowing this, then from a purely game-theoretical perspective, the psychopathic butcher would realize that if he wanted to be competitive in his village, he should probably dial the psychopathy back. An alternative would be to outright attack competition, but before the industrial revolution he probably wouldn't have enough of a leg up on challengers to afford that. Arguably that has changed since, where incumbents benefiting from economies of scale have much greater advantage over new competitors and therefore have less to fear from bad behavior (see basically the history of labor post-industrial revolution). Incumbents do still get disrupted, but for some reason virtually never on ethical differentiation.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  If they knew he was a psychopath, they wouldn't shop from him, regardless of behaviour. And that's my point. Self-interest is obviously not enough to sustain a successful society, it's only really enough when combined with all the unwritten rules of common decency in society, and I'm sure that's how Adam Smith meant it too.