Episode Ninety Nine

0:00Welcome to Smith and Mark's Walk into a Bar, a History of Economics podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Jennifer Jun, sitting here in Durham, North Carolina, and I'm joined online by my co-host, Francois Alisson. Are you in Lausanne? You look like you're in a different room today. No, I'm in Lausanne. I'm at home, just back from Easter vacations.

0:30Ah, welcome back, welcome back. I hope you had a good time. It was, it was. Excellent. And I'm also joined here by Jinla Akdera. You're also in a room that I don't recognize. Are you in Ankara right now? Yes, I'm in Ankara. This time I'm not at home, in my office actually. I'm at the office, contrary to Francois. Yeah, a little, I had a little flu last, last week. Not a little, actually. I had really struggled with a, with a strong flu, and I'm almost done now.

1:03A little bit tired of flu, actually. Oh, goodness. I'm so sorry to hear. I feel better soon. I'm doing very well. I'm doing very well. I don't have the flu, but it's, it's, we call it, colloquially, the great pollening down here in Durham. So we get a lot of, we get a lot of pollen around this time of year. So, not quite the flu, but not feeling super great. But in any case, I do have great news, which is that we are very excited to introduce today's guest to you. I have online Dr. Benoit Valrement, who is a lecturer in economics at the University of Cannes Normandy in Cannes, France.

1:39And we are going to talk about some of Benoit's work today. And Jinla's actually got the first question about your work on Adam Smith. But first, welcome to the show, Benoit.

1:51Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be invited in your famous podcast. So, I don't like much bars, but I love Smith and Mark, so I should enjoy it, hopefully. Very good. Well, welcome to the show. Thank you, Jen. As 2026 is the 250th anniversary of that of Nations, let's begin with your book on Adam Smith. The title of the book is Adam Smith's System, a reinterpretation inspired by Smith's lecture on rhetoric, game theory, and conjectural history,

2:25published by Palgrave in 2022 and co-authored with Andreas Ortman. The book offers a perspective and sophisticated analysis of strategic interactions and game theory based on Smith. You defend the idea that book five of The Welt of Nations is unfairly neglected by many interpreters of Smith. The question is, what is hidden in book five of The Welt of Nations and why is it so important for you and for the co-author?

3:02Well, thank you, Tina. As you mentioned, first, we underlined that book five of The Welt of Nations is rather neglected in Smith's scholarship, not specifically by specialists, but more by people-wide audience books or textbooks. So, with regard to other books of The Welt of Nations, of course, book one or even book four because of The Invisible End. So, it was a starting point. Why is it neglected? And then, what we found in book five are different things.

3:37As you mentioned, too, the book was written with Andreas Ortman, and Andreas had written a piece in the 1990s, 1996 or 1997, I don't remember. But, a piece on interpreting both five of The Welt of Nations as the first incentive-compatible state intervention analysis.

4:02And so, Andreas focused on Smith's analysis of joint stock companies, educational institutions, ecclesiastical institutions. And so, this chapter is reproduced in the book. So, the book is a mix of works which are already published by one of them or other people. And then, from new works we made together, I will explain maybe later how we interacted. And so, first, there is this analysis of incentive-compatible state intervention.

4:35Then, what we tried to underline in the first chapter, the new chapter that we wrote together, was the importance of the rhetoric of The Welt of Nations, of its attack on the mercantile system. We tried to show that Smith was using, to that aim, one of the rhetorical techniques he taught to his students, what he called the Socratic method. It is a method to be used for him when you know that you will face a supposedly hostile audience.

5:10And the idea is to keep as far as possible from the main point for long and to introduce this point slowly and imperceptibly to gain the favor of the readers. So, we think that what Smith did in The Welt of Nations, because he doesn't talk about the mercantile system explicitly before Book 4, but you also have some hints in Book 3, etc. And it's really in Book 5 that the core of the attack on the mercantile system is found in the West of Nations.

5:43And still, on this question of what we found in Book 5, we provided also a new chapter, which aims to interpret Smith's views on the world of the state through game theory. So, we use what Andreas had already formalized as what he calls Smith's games, it means symmetric and asymmetric prisoners' dilemma games, to address such issues as public words, positive and negative externalities, and other examples of social dilemmas in Smith's.

6:15In this particular chapter that you shared with us, you and Ortman argue that Smith made use of three distinct reasoning routines to deal with subjects that were rhetorical, moral, economic, and political. My question is a bit of a two-parter. I wanted to ask, what makes those issues different from each other, the rhetorical, moral, economic, political ones? And then on top of that, here's the second part, what were those three different distinct reasoning routines that you described?

6:45Thank you. What we call the first reasoning routine is what we call Smith's Newtonian view of the world. It's the idea that Smith conceptualizes the world as a kind of machine that followed certain invisible laws of motion that philosophers should imagine and discover. It reflects Smith's well documented infatuation with a Newtonian or deductive view of the world and his attempt to do for moral philosophy what Newton had done for natural philosophy.

7:21What we call this second reasoning routine or way of seeing the world is reflected in his understanding of the strategic nature of all things rhetorical, moral, political, and economic, which can then be interpreted game-theoretically. And the third one is an evolutionary view. It reflects Smith's belief in the evolutionary or inductive nature of many systems, be they social or other.

7:51So it's all about the emergence and evolution of economic norms, prices, or social and moral norms, or linguistic norms. And so our work was to show that all three can be applied to Smith's understanding and explanation of economic interaction, social interaction, and moral interactions. For us, Smith's thought really similarly and analogously, these different domains of social interactions. Even though Smith was aware of the dangers of the love of systems, we believe that Smith was a great system lover.

8:30In addition to these three distinct reasoning routines, you also identify a meta-routine that you call the Wonder Surprise Admiration, or WSA for short. Routine in this chapter as well. So how does this fit as an overarching principle in your interpretation of Smith?

8:50Well, the description of the Wonder Surprise Admiration cognitive algorithm is very important in the book, in this chapter, which is the core of the book, in a way. This sequence, Wonder Surprise Admiration, as many people know now, is described by Smith in his famous History of Astronomy. It is used by Smith to explain the foundation, the emotional foundation, in a way of scientific or philosophical research, the pleasure of discoveries, and how we understand the natural world.

9:23The observation of repeated regular events creates in our minds some kind of causal chain between them. So if A happens and B comes, but when something unexpected happens, we are troubled and surprised and we feel some discomfort because we no more understand what happens and our cognitive algorithm is broken. So we need to find a new explanation, a kind of causal chain, so to speak, to fill the painful gap in our imagination and to restore the pleasant, the enjoyable tranquility of our mind, prompted by the peaceful admiration of the beautiful order of nature.

10:10Our main argument in the chapter is that Smith applied this kind of wonder, surprise, and migration that go into economics, morality, and language. We see this aesthetical love for order and harmony as a main and distinctive feature of human nature for Smith and the foundation of our understanding of both the natural and social world. We can find, we can find, Smith says, an intrinsic pleasure of exchanging, of persuading others, of being in agreement with others, and an intrinsic pleasure, a very important one in Smith's serious moral sentiments of mutual sympathy.

10:54So for Smith, man, he's deep down a social creature who creates for a social harmony. Thank you. How do you describe conjectural history? How does conjectural history contribute to your interpretation of Smith? Can you tell us a little bit about your understanding of conjectural history, actually? Yes, of course. The expression, I think, was coined by Dougal Stewart, Smith's first biographer, and still a precious source of information on Smith,

11:28because he was the only biographer of Smith who knew him personally. And so in Stewart's, conjectural history refers to the new view of history, a theoretical and philosophical history promoted by the Scottish Enlightenment. So Hume, you can find that in Hume, you can find that in Hume, you can find that in Hume, in Smith, Ferguson, Miller, Kemp, etc., but also in the French Enlightenment, Turgot and Rousseau. And in particular, I think, there are four stages, series of human development.

12:01What is the idea behind conjectural history? Conjectural history is the idea that when facts or information are missing, the conjectural historian will fill the gap with plausible conjectures and hypotheses to keep a current narrative about the evolution of society. And so following Smith, we try to provide a kind of conjectural history of the reasoning routines we identified in his works. In other words, we try to explain when, why, and how Smith's reasoning routines appeared, how important events or circumstances in his life might have affected his way of seeing the world.

12:44Thank you very much, Benoit. I will now ask you a question a bit different about, to take a bit of distance with what we just talked about and ask you, what is your perspective on the current state of Smith scholarship and the community of Smith scholars?

13:04Well, that's a good question. I will expose my own point of view, of course, the point of view of an insider. I've been reading Smith and writing on Smith for almost two decades now, and I've read a lot of paper in different journals on Smith. So, honestly, I'm a bit pessimistic or disappointed by the evolution of Smith scholarship. I think it's a bit overcrowded now. My impression, but it's only a personal impression again, is that not much really new and exciting has been published during the last years about Smith and that our understanding of Smith or of his thoughts didn't really progress much during the last few years.

13:55There are many, many sessions on Smith in different HGT conferences, many, many papers published. And, of course, I can understand that people want to work on Smith because it's very rewarding and pleasant. But maybe we'll reach a point where we need to think about that. For example, I had a discussion with an editor of a specific journal in HGT, and he told me that Smith scholarship, Smith was a topic on which he received by far the most important number of submissions.

14:34But it was also the topic on which he received by far the lowest rate of acceptance and the harshest reviewers. So, it can be tough to work on Smith. Everyone knows that. And, yeah, of course, I'm not against people celebrating Smith's anniversary. But from my own point of view, yeah, maybe we should slow a bit. I don't know. Maybe I'm biased, too, because it might be the consequence of my own, I would say, complicated relationship with Smith now.

15:11The passion has gone. And in a way, I've lost the feeling of wonder, surprise and admiration. I had in reading Meme, and I'm no more excited in reading other great economists and philosophers because they make me feel again this pleasure of new discoveries. So, I don't find these new discoveries when I read Smith, and maybe it's linked to that. So, it's just a personal point of view, of course. Thank you for this personal point of view. I will try to remember to ask you that question in 10 years, and we'll see how the situation has changed since then.

15:48I suggest that we move to another topic, because you send us also a paper titled Rawls' Maximin and Optimal Taxation Theory, which came out in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought in 2023. And so, let's begin first by reviewing some vocabulary. Can you tell us what is the Maximin criterion as Rawls used in a theory of justice, and what is Optimal Taxation Theory?

16:24Okay, well, the Maximin criterion is a criterion derived from Rawls' second principle of justice, a difference principle, which is well known from economists who focused almost exclusively on that. The Maximin criterion says that inequalities are just when they are to the maximum benefit of the least advantage in terms of primary goods. And so, as to your second question, optimal taxation theory is a branch of public economics that seeks to determine how governments should design tax systems

17:01to achieve specific economic and social objectives as efficiently as possible. The theory balances several key goals, such as revenue rising, efficiency, and equity. And it addresses such questions as should the government use income or commodity taxes. Within commodity taxes, how should tax rates vary across commodities? How progressive should the tax system be? In this particular paper, at least historically speaking, we're situated kind of like before and after the 70s.

17:54So I had a question about historical context. What was taxation like before the 70s? Like what was going on during this time and what happens after the 70s? There are actually two important changes that you flag in your paper, and we would like to know what you could tell us about those changes. And in this kind of soup, like how is Rawls relevant? Why were taxation theorists so drawn to Rawls' ideas? Okay, well, I think that before this emergence of optimal taxation theory, what we had was principles of public finance.

18:34So the main textbook was Musgrave, which is used by Rawls in the theory of justice. Public finance offered some abstract normative principles of taxation, whose practical application for public policy were not clear. That was the main criticism made by, I think, economists at that time. So this principle where the ability to pay versus benefit principle, for example, or also the principles of horizontal versus vertical equality.

19:08But even if you look at the benefit principle, you cannot claim for sure that it legitimates some progressive taxation and so on. And even better, it doesn't tell you if you have to put a maximum marginal rate of, I don't know, 40% or 50% or 55%, etc. So the emergence of optimal taxation theory was quite important because some economics began using the tools of neoclassical economics,

19:38optimization theory to deal with taxation and other issues of government interventions like the provision of public goods, etc. And so two important events, two important papers or books, in a way, where first, James Smirley's 1971 paper on optimal income taxation, which was the pioneer of work on optimal taxation. He already had contributed to public economics with diamond, but it was more, I think, on commodity taxation, if I remember well.

20:19And then it was, as you mentioned, the publication of also theory of justice. What was so important, because prior to rule theory of justice,

20:37the only or the dominant criterion of social welfare was the utilitarian criterion of maximizing social utility. And so economists saw in rule theory of justice an alternative to utilitarianism. And it was, of course, an alternative to utilitarianism, but as I show in the paper, they use it in a very specific way, in an economic way, in a way they interpreted the maximin in a welfarist way, which is not in agreement with what Holtz had in mind.

21:15But anyway, that's why for many reasons that I'll explain in the paper, they decided to use a welfarist interpretation of the maximin criterion in order to see if other approaches of social justice and fairness could provide different results on optimal income taxation and top marginal tax rate, etc., and the progressiveness of income taxation.

21:47Thank you. There are many influences also on Marx's ideas. You argue that bantamate, democratic and egalitarian ideas all influenced Rawls' theory of justice. To which was Rawls' most loyal, according to you? Thank you, Shina. Sorry, I had to plug in my computer.

22:12Well, I think it's difficult to say maybe democratic and even more egalitarian ideas are very important for Rawls. Of course, Rawls was and is still first and foremost a liberal, the first principle of justice as a lexical priority over the second. And I think that his mix or his kind of compromise between liberalism and egalitarianism is part of his success during the 20th century.

22:45And still today, for people who are looking for, yeah, some kind of reconciliation between liberalism and egalitarianism or socialism, etc. But for sure, what I can say is that once he was the least loyal was Benthamitides. The project of Rawls was to provide a true alternative to utilitarianism, even though in the beginning, in the 1950s and 60s, early 60s, he was still influenced by utilitarianism.

23:16But then he really decided to provide an alternative to that. And he was quite critical also in the theory of justice of welfare economics, the application of utilitarianism in innovative economics. So, ironically, most of his legacy in economics come from welfare economics.

23:36Yes, it's really hard to work on Rawls also. I tried once. As economists, what is the message we should take away from Rawls' work then?

23:51Well, I think there are many messages we can take away from him. Of course, he was not the first, but he helped economists to think about studying more issues of justice and fairness in economics rather than focusing on efficiency alone, for example. So, it's still important for us. Then there is the way he tries to define a criterion of just inequality.

24:21So, the maximum criterion we talked about before. So, maybe it's not the best way to understand just inequalities, but it's one way to understand it. And I think that many economists like it because, in a way, that the maximum of equality is compatible with efficiency. So, it can explain to you why it was so successful among the economics. And third, I think what is interesting in Rawls is that he tries to think what a good, fair, just, and ecologically sustainable socioeconomic system is or could be.

25:00So, that's an important lesson for us today. I really think that economists should spend more time to understand and defend what they think is a good economic system. So, we will talk about that maybe later if we talk about Piketty.

25:18Okay. But before speaking of Piketty, I would like to speak about archives because you rely on this piece, on archival materials. And I would like to know if you have some things to tell us about your own relationship to archival work. Well, I love it, for sure. I find something quite romantic in archival work.

25:48I don't know if it's the same for other people, but especially when you work on really old stuff and papers. I've always done HCT the old way, I would say, by reading and analyzing text and identifying concepts and so on. So, I'm still doing that, and I love it. But a few years ago, I began a huge project, still unfinished, on the Marquis de Mirabeau, the famous physiocrat and friend of François Quenet. There, I studied unpublished manuscripts and correspondence from the end of Mirabeau and his copyists, or fully his copyists, because just transcribing Mirabeau's manuscript can be a tough exercise, because his handwriting is very hard to read.

26:35But it's so nice to have in your hand an 18th century original manuscript, especially if he can shed new light on your author and his thought. So, archives, I think, can be a good mind for historians of ideas and full of joys. What I'm looking for are unpublished manuscripts, different versions of papers and books. That's what I found, for example, for the paper on Rose Maximin. I found different versions of, many different versions of Atkinson's paper on progressive taxation in the 1970s.

27:08I also am looking for correspondence and so on. Or everything that can help to improve our understanding of an author's economic theory. So, my interest in the end is mainly analytical. I don't care much about anecdotal and biographical stuff. And so, if I follow Miss Meta-reasoning Watkins, still, again, I think that Archival work can be full of wonder and surprise, of unexpected discoveries,

27:40especially after long hours of unfruitful research. Because it's also that, the work on archives. Hopefully, I love searching and digging and I'm patient and persistent. And so, I think that the specific charm of archives comes from the feeling of intimacy you have. The sentiment of getting closer to the thinker, to his mind, to his writing and thinking process, by entering, in a way, into his writing or her writing workshop.

28:14As a prime example, and recent example, I could mention my experience working on Maurice Allais' papers in Saint-Cloud. It is a private fund owned by his daughter, Christine Allais, who presides now the Maurice Allais Foundation. And it is located in the place where Allais lived for decades and died. So, it's very emotional even to go there and work on Maurice Allais' office on his own papers.

28:42I have a follow-up question to what you just said. You mentioned that you like to do history of economic thought the old way. And this implies that there is a new way, that perhaps you like it less. Or how would you characterize the new way or another way of doing history of economic thought that maybe you're skeptical of?

29:03Well, I don't know if there is a new way of doing history. Maybe what I would call a new way is to use different methods, for example, qualitative methods. All these projects on all histories is very interesting, for example. And even in my own research, I try to integrate now some interviews when I can. So, maybe we'll discuss that later. But I've interviewed Piketty and many people around him to know better and to improve my papers.

29:34And the second kind of new history of economic thought, which is quite interesting, too, is the use of quantitative methods, of course, or bibliometric methods. And that, too, I try to integrate, but with the help of research engineers, I have to admit. So, we made some analysis of co-authorship and co-citation and so on. So, you can also, of course, use digital humanities for analyzing some big corpus of very long and very long text, many pages.

30:05So, there are some very, very interesting things. So, when I was a student, it was a long time ago, and we didn't have access to that. So, I didn't know how to do it, but I tried to learn that, too, because I think it's important. Ah, so not so much skepticism, so much as there are just different ways of approaching how to do history. But you mentioned Piketty, and I did want to ask you about your paper. It came out in 2023 in the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics called Ideologies and Utopia, a recurring reading of Thomas Piketty.

30:42And I've got a first question about vocabulary, which is, what's the difference between ideology and utopia?

30:54Well, to explain it, I will use Riker's thought, because I think it's quite pertinent on this question. For Riker, ideology and utopia are the two inseparable facets of social imagination. So, these two idealities are the art of our social imagination, and they establish our collective identity. So, for Riker, every society needs a representation of its own identity. And so, no representation of social order is possible without ideology and utopia.

31:29So, for Riker, ideology needs utopia and vice versa. We always need utopia in its fundamental function of contestation and projection into a radical elsewhere to cure the rigidity and prettification of ideology. But we also need ideology to cure utopia from the madness it may fall into and to provide a historical community with a narrative identity. So, for Riker, it's impossible to imagine a society without utopia,

32:00because it will be a society without purpose. Utopia is a kind of escape from, and the weapon of criticism of social order. It helps us to understand the contingency of existing order, and so to take a fresh look at our reality. What they have in common for Riker is that there are necessary non-conformity with social and historical reality. But ideology exercises a kind of resistance to change

32:32and aims at preserving the past order while utopia is oriented towards the future and brings about change, breaking through what he calls the sickness of reality.

32:43And I was curious about some details about Piketty's project. He tells us that history consists in a struggle of ideologies towards an end that's marked by equality, and he offers a kind of socialism as a normative suggestion. This is participatory socialism, and I wanted to ask, what is participatory socialism, and how is it different from other socialisms?

33:08Okay, well, I've been working on Piketty for a few years now. I'm still working on him. I had the chance to meet him recently. So after reading my latest working paper on him, he kindly invited me to have lunch, and it was a great expense for me because I could ask him many questions I had about his work's motivation and plans for the future. And Piketty was very nice, open-minded, and curious about what I do, and not only about what I think about him. So I first started working on Piketty in 2019 or early 2020

33:51when he tried to elaborate a theory of social justice in the ultimate chapter of Capital and Ideology and to identify what kind of socioeconomic system might sustain it. And so, to answer your question, participatory socialism is Piketty's ideal socioeconomic system. I'm not sure it's revolutionary, and it really overcomes capitalism, as he pretends it.

34:22There is some debate about that, and we can discuss it, of course. It's more a kind of radical social democracy with hyper-redistributive policies. So Piketty advocates, as is well-known, highly progressive taxation of income, wealth, and the transfer of wealth. He also pleads for capital and demand for all. He defends the wide range of free public services, measures for economic democracy, etc. Then he added, in subsequent works,

34:54some references to cooperatives, commons, job guarantee, universal basic income, so the whole package of the left. And, well, the idea, I think, the main idea of Piketty is to favor a wide circulation of private property and wealth among the population, rather than an abolition of private property per se, in order to avoid that some people become very rich and stayed forever. In the first piece I wrote on him, I said somewhat provocatively

35:25that he was not a socialist, so, of course, he did not like it. And he answered then in the same journal. At least, I think it's participatory socialism, is socialist in the sense that it values equality above all. As I see it, Piketty's view of social justice was influenced by many different streams, like Rawls' theory of justice, of course, solidarism, French solidarism, the idea of property earning democracy, but also he was influenced by the series of deliberative democracy.

36:00Very interesting. Thank you, Benoit. Perhaps you can give us some hints about how does Piketty's understanding of history affect his description of the functioning of the capitalist system, a question that interests me particularly. Thank you. That's a tough question. Well, I think that he insists a lot on, as you know, maybe in capital and ideology,

36:30on the role of the struggle of ideology as a driver of history. And so, logically, he was accused, especially by Marxists, communists, and anti-capitalists in general, of being an idealist who forgets about the fundamental role of material forces, social struggles, strikes, and so on. So he tried to answer that in different answers to specific issues on the book. But for sure, I think Piketty doesn't seem to understand capital,

37:01or he doesn't want to understand capital as a social and domination relationship, as Marxists do. And so he has a kind of very orthodox or neoclassical view of capital, or no real concept of capital at all, Marxists would argue. I refer here, for example, to a famous conference in French between Frédéric Lordon and Thomas Piketty. It was organized by the newspaper L'Humanité, and Lordon, who is a great rhetorician,

37:33orator, began his presentation of Piketty's capital and ideology, saying, OK, this is a book called Capital and Ideology, and there is no concept of capital and no concept of ideology, too. So it's a bit harsh, of course. But, yeah, I think that's something you can read, especially from the left, and especially from Marxists when they read Piketty.

38:04And you talk about Paul Ricoeur also. What made you think of writing a Ricoeurian interpretation of Piketty? How does Ricoeur figure into the argument? How does reading Ricoeur help us to understand Piketty better?

38:23Well, the starting point is the fact that Piketty in Capital and Ideology had offered a very broad and unspecified conception of ideology I was not satisfied with.

38:41Piketty defined ideologies, as he says, in a positive and constructive way, very vaguely, as more or less Korean discourses, and, I quote, a set of a priori plausible ideas on how society should be structured, having economic, political, and social dimensions. Or, to quote him again, as an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society, expressing an idea of social justice.

39:15So, I turned to Paul Ricoeur because I was looking for a more substantive and philosophical account of the concept of ideology. And Ricoeur provided a kind of three-level analysis of ideology. So, he says that there are different, more or less deep levels of ideology. The first level is dissimulation, the Marxian concept. Then there is the view of ideology. The middle level is domination.

39:45And the main level for Ricoeur is the main aim of ideology is conservation of social order.

39:54So, I find in Ricoeur a very nice analysis of ideologies and, more importantly, of the dialectics of ideology and utopia, which I think can be footfully applied to Piketty to enrich his thought. In particular, Ricoeur tried to define what are good utopias.

40:18Ricoeur argues that good utopias are practical, political utopias, actualizing latent potentialities from the past and present, and aiming at effectively transforming social order. While bad ones would be utopias, which are an escape from reality or some kind of dreams of a perfect, though unrealizable society, often based on an unrealistic view

40:48of human nature and history. And I think that this idea of good utopia, as it is described by Ricoeur, can be found in Piketty and his project of participative socialism. Okay.

41:06And now we arrive, I think, to the last question, not specifically targeted at one of the pieces you sent us, because you have been involved, as many of us have here, in co-writing pieces, such as the book you mentioned at the beginning of our talk with Andreas Altman on Adam Smith. And we would like to ask you about your experience with co-authorship.

41:36Well, maybe I'm a lucky guy, but I always had some positive, mutually beneficial, and sometimes great experiences in co-authorship. Finding people with whom I was quite complimentary and having some good time with them, which is quite important too. So of course, not every co-author will become your best buddy. I even published a paper with someone I never seen face-to-face. But yeah, some of them are now friends, at least from

42:07my own point of view.

42:10Importantly, I think it reminds us that our work, though often quite solitary, is collaborative and cooperative all along, and that what counts in the end is not only what we think, write and publish, but also the links we create between us. That's why I'm always open to new collaborations. And so, well, a few words about my collaboration with Andreas. We met in 2011,

42:41I think, thanks to Laurie Brébon, thanks to Laurie, who was also doing a PhD on Smith at Farr in Paris. and she gave me the email address, my email address to Andreas, I think, and then he contacted me because he had similar interests in Smith and especially in his lectures on rhetoric and the origin of languages. So, Andreas had some very nice working paper which became the main manuscript,

43:13the drafts of the chapters of the book we made together. So, we worked together for years despite the distance between us. Andreas is working in Australia and he's a behavioral and experimental economist. And so, we met several times in Europe, especially in Paris but also in Prague where he was still affiliated with others. So, Andreas is a very nice and generous guy and I'm very happy to have known him thanks to our project and common love

43:43for Adam Smith. And, to finish also on a positive point, even when the collaboration was not quite successful from an academic point of view, it was usually a good experience. For example, with Chinla, we made an application for a grant of the CNRS in France with a very interesting project on imagination in economics and that unfortunately it wasn't successful but through that I learned to know Chinla much better and to realize

44:14the beautiful person she is.

44:17What an incredibly lovely way to reach into our interview. Benoit, thank you so much for this conversation with us and for sharing your work with us and for you and for the rest of our audience members I hope something comes your way whether that's more Adam Smith or something else that once again kicks off the wonder surprise admiration algorithm for you. is of course everyone go read your roles and go make some friends. Benoit, thank you very much for stopping by today.

44:47Thank you to you. Thank you also and I still believe that one day we will succeed to get some funding for this project because I'm still working on it so I keep hope. There is a thing that I wanted to mention I know somebody in philosophy of science who is working on imagination in science so I don't know if this I saw him like a few years ago at a conference but he may be

45:18someone that you may be interested in talking to so I'll send along his project information to you. Actually I'm writing a paper the paper of related to that project and I'll present it in Glasgow in the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith in Glasgow because it was accepted I sent it the abstract I'm not an Adam Smith scholar as you mentioned today I'm a newcomer to Adam Smith studies I had an idea

45:49I sent it the abstract and I already worked when with Benoit we were talking about the project we worked on it a little bit so then I'm writing the paper I will meet all Adam Smith scholar in Glasgow this year I'm so excited about it and I hope that the project will see the day one day because I stick to it and didn't abandon it actually Benoit so I hope actually I hope we will again

46:19have this opportunity to collaborate I hope it too so we encourage people to discuss with us if they are interesting in our project join us again next month for another episode of Smig's and Mark's Walk into a Bar a History of Economics podcast we'll see you next week we'll see you next week we'll see you next week