Jesse Norman

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope 2019 brings all readers of this website great joy and happiness.

For me, 2018 was a year in which I tried to make an extended argument for a different kind of economics, or rather, political economy, in the UK, USA and elsewhere.  

My book on Adam Smith and his impact was written to help us regain a better public understanding of the ways in which different markets work, the dangers of crony capitalism, the factors that shape social norms and expectations, the benefits of "commercial society" and open trade, the co-evolving mutual advantages of markets and a well-functioning state, and the dynamic nature of human commercial, moral and intellectual exchange.  On all of which issues Smith has insights of still-astonishing depth and importance.

A nuanced historical perspective is perhaps more vital than ever today. And I have found Smith's ideas of huge value in thinking about current and future Government policy on transport, including the value of active travel, the impact of electric and autonomous vehicles, future connectivity and the remodelling of urban space.

Some of these pieces from 2018 are below. You may also enjoy a brief rebuttal at the end of the idea that ministers should not be writing about such matters at all!

With all good wishes,

Jesse

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Adam Smith and his impact:
FT:  How Adam Smith would fix capitalism
https://www.ft.com/content/6795a1a0-7476-11e8-b6ad-3823e4384287

WSJ:  What Adam Smith Knew About Trade Wars
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-adam-smith-knew-about-trade-wars-1535036195

Spectator:  Adam Smith, Trump and Trade
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/adam-smith-would-have-approved-of-trumps-trade-tariffs/

Reviews of other books:
Thomas Paine, by Jonathan Clark:  Spendthrift, Scrounger, and Polemicist of Genius
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/thomas-paine-spendthrift-scrounger-and-polemicist-of-genius/

John Law, by James Buchan: A Law Unto Himself
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/john-law-the-scottish-gambler-who-rescued-france-from-bankruptcy/

Talks:

LSE:  Adam Smith: What he Thought, and Why it Matters (with Tim Besley)
https://soundcloud.com/lsepodcasts/adam-smith-what-he-thought-and

Economists that shaped history (with Linda Yueh)
https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/linda-yueh-and-jesse-norman-on-the-economists-that-shaped-history/

Other:
FT:  Economic Fairness is a Bipartisan Challenge

https://www.ft.com/content/a9f87080-b298-11e8-87e0-d84e0d934341

ConHome:  Whatever happened to the Big Society?
https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2018/03/whatever-happened-to-the-big-society-2-jesse-norman-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters.html

Literary Review:  Why politicians should write
https://jessenorman.typepad.com/files/letters-page.pdf

Literary Review: Letters

Jesse writes to The Editor.

Download Letters Page

Philosopher, king?

Jesse Norman, the former philosophy teacher tipped as a future Tory leader, tells Mark McLaughlin how austerity is compassionate, tuition fees are progressive and why the robots are our friends.

Download Holyrood

Unpublished Letter to The Times, 19 October 2018

Sir

On 9th February 1825 The Times printed an open letter from the poet Thomas Campbell to Henry Brougham MP, calling for a new university, the first in England outside Oxford and Cambridge, to be established in London.

The Price of Freedom

Adam Smith’s free-market economic theories may be more than two centuries old, but we still have much to learn from him, Jesse Norman MP tells Alec Marsh

Download Spears_Magazine_Price_of_Freedom

Wall Street Journal book review: ‘Adam Smith: Father of Economics’ Review: Obvious, Simple and Wise

The British politician and philosopher Jesse Norman has written that rarest of things, a wise book accessible to the general reader. Clever and well-written books abound. But most are unwise. And most wise books are difficult to get beyond page three. Not this one.

Financial Times: Economic fairness is a bipartisan challenge

At 304 pages and 18 months in the making by 22 commissioners — including the Archbishop of Canterbury — the new Prosperity and Justice report by the UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research is clearly intended to be a heavyweight piece of work. And it is.

Wall Street Journal: What Adam Smith Knew About Trade Wars

In recent weeks, the U.S. and China have announced tens of billions of dollars of import tariffs on goods including steel and aluminum, washing machines and bicycles, coal and diesel. With at least $200 billion of further tariffs in prospect on the U.S. side alone, the possibility of the world’s first trillion-dollar trade war cannot be ruled out.

Financial Times book review: Is there more to Adam Smith than free markets?

No one is more widely quoted by people who have not read his work. Even those who have never visited a library, far less opened a copy of The Wealth of Nations, know that Adam Smith extolled the public benefit of individual selfishness and the necessity of maximally free markets, excoriating the malign impact of government intervention in economic matters. They are familiar with his metaphor of “the invisible hand” and know that it is “not from benevolence” that the baker provides our daily bread. Smith provided inspiration for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and occupies a place as an icon of economic liberalism. When Gordon Brown invited Alan Greenspan to Kirkcaldy, where Smith was born and Brown educated, Greenspan could suggest that the something in the air was not the smell of linoleum — which hung over that town for a century — but a contagious miasma of economic genius.

The Spectator review: Adam Smith analysed human behaviour, not economics, says Simon Heffer

Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. It must vex him, as it does most of us with A-levels, to witness the distressingly ignorant, chaotic and unprincipled way in which the government, run by the party of which he is a member, conducts its business and that of the country. Those who control the destinies of that government would do well to read his book on Adam Smith, and indeed Adam Smith himself. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments — which Norman correctly esteems as a fine work of philosophy with a great bearing on how we should run a civilised society — would, like its successor The Wealth of Nations, give our rulers much to think about in respect of how they discharge their duties and what proper governance really means: if they had the wit, and lacked the venality, to act on it.