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 jen sitting here in durham north carolina and i'm joined online by my co-host francois allison in are you in lausanne you look like you're in a different room today no i'm in lausanne i'm at home uh just back from easter vacations ah welcome back welcome back i

0:32hope 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 a little i had the little flu last last week not a little actually i had really struggled with a with a strong flu uh and i'm almost done now a little bit tired of flu actually oh my goodness i'm so

1:07sorry 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 uh 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 uh 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 valremont who is a lecturer in economics at the university of can normandy in

1:38can france and 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 thank you very much thank you for inviting me it's a pleasure and uh 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 welcome to the show thank you jen um as 2026 is the 250th anniversary of that of nations

2:13let'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 published 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 wealth of nations in if unfairly neglected by many interpreters

2:48of smiths uh the question is uh what is hidden in book five of the wealth of nations and why is it so important for you and for uh the quarter well thank you china um as you mentioned first um we underlined that book five for the wealth of nations is rather neglected in smith scholarship not specifically by specialists but uh more by uh people wider than books or textbooks so with regard to other books of

3:24the wealth of nations of course book one or even book four because of the invisible end so it was a starting point why why is it neglected and then uh what we found in book five are different things um as you mentioned too uh the book was written with andreas ortman and andreas had written a piece in in the 1990s 1996 or 1997 i don't remember that but um a piece on uh on interpreting both five the wealth of nations as uh the first incentive compatible state uh intervention analysis uh and so andreas focused on uh smith's

4:04analysis of joint stock companies educational institutions ecclesiastical institutions and so this chapter is reproduced in the in the book so the book is a mix of uh works which are already published by one of them or other people and then uh from uh new new works we we made together i will explain uh maybe later how we interacted and so first there is this analysis of incentive compatible state intervention then what we

4:37tried to underline um in the first chapter the new chapter that we we wrote together was the importance of the rhetoric of the wealth of nation of its attack on the mercantile system we tried to show that smith was using uh to that aim as one of the rhetorical techniques he taught to his students what is called what he called the socratic method uh it is a method to be used for him when you know that you will face

5:07a supposedly hostile audience and the idea is to keep as far as possible from the main point for long and to introduce uh this point slowly and imperceptibly to gain the favor of the readers so i think we think that what smith uh did in the west of nation because you it doesn't talk about the mercantile system before uh explicitly before the book four but you also have some hints in the book three etc and it's really in book five that uh the core of the attack on the mercantile system is uh found in the west of nation

5:42and um still the on this question of what we found in book five uh we provided also a new chapter uh which seems to we interpret smith's views on the world of the state uh through game theory uh so we use uh what andreas had already formalized as uh what he calls smith's games you know it means symmetric and asymmetric prisoners dilemma games uh to address such issues as public words positive and negative externalities and other example of social dilemmas in smith's in this particular chapter

6:17that 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 uh here's the second part what were those three different distinct reasoning routines that you described thank you um what we call the first

6:49reasoning routine is what we call smith's newtonian view of the world is the idea that smith's conceptualizes the world as a kind of machine that followed a certain invisible laws of motion that philosophers should imagine and discover uh 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 uh this what we call his second uh reasoning routine or way of seeing the

7:27world is uh reflected in his understanding of the strategic nature of all things rhetorical more moral political and economic which can then be interpreted uh game theoretically and the third one is uh an evolutionary view uh it reflects misbelief in the evolutionary or inductive nature of many systems business social or other so it's all about the emergence and evolution of economic norms prices on social and moral norms or linguistic norms and so our work was to show that all three can be applied to

8:06smith's understanding and explanation of economic interaction social interaction and mobile interactions for us smith sought really similarly and analogously these different domains of social interactions even though uh smith was aware of the dangers of the love of systems we believe that smith was a great system lover in addition to these three distinct reasoning routines you also identify a meta routine uh that you

8:37call the wonder surprise admiration or wsa for short uh routine in this chapter as well so how does this fit as as an overarching principle in your interpretation of smith well the description of the wonder surprise admiration uh cognitive algorithm is very important in the book in this chapter with but which is the core of the book in a way um this sequence wonder surprise admiration uh as many people know now is

9:08described by smith in his famous history of astronomy it is used by smith to explain the the foundation the emotional foundation in a way of scientific of philosophical research the pleasure of discoveries and how we understand the natural world um here's how smith sees it um the observation of repeated regular events creates in our mind some kind of causal chain between them so if a happens and b comes but when something

9:40unexpected happens we are troubled and surprised and we feel some discomfort because we no more understand what happens and uh our cognitive algorithm is broken so we need to find a new explanation a kind of new causal chain so to speak to fill the painful gap in our imagination and to restore the pleasant uh the enjoyable tranquility of our mind prompted by the peaceful admiration of the beautiful order of nature our main argument in the chapter is that smith applied this uh kind of wonder surprise

10:16admiration and go into economics morality and language um we 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 um we can find smith says

10:39an intrinsic pleasure of exchanging of persuading others of being in agreement with others and uh an intrinsic pleasure a very important one in smith's uh serious moral sentiments of mutual sympathy so for smith's mind is deep down a social creature who creates for social harmony

11:01thank you um how do you describe conjectural history how does conjectural history contribute to your interpretation of smith can you tell us a little bit about uh your understanding of conjectural history actually yes of course um the expression i think was coined by dougal stuart smith's first biographer and still a precious source of information on smith because he was the only biographer of smith who knew him

11:33personally and uh so in stuart's conjectural history refers to the new view of history a theoretical and philosophical history promoted by the scottish enlightenment so you you can find that in hume and smith ferguson millarkens etc but also in the french enlightenment turgot and rousseau in particular i think so there are four stages series of human development what is the idea behind conjectural history

12:04is 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 uh or circumstances in his life might have affected uh his way of seeing the

12:42world thank you very much benoit i will now ask you a question a bit different about um to take a bit of distance with um 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 right that's a good question um i will expose my own point of view uh of course uh the point of view of an insider i've been reading smith and writing on smith for

13:17almost two decades now and i've read a lot of paper in different journals on smith so honestly i'm a bit uh pessimistic uh or disappointed by the evolution of smith scholarship i think it's a bit overcrowded now um my impression but it's only a personal impression again is that not much really new and exciting has been published uh during the last years about smith and that our understanding of smith or

13:49of his thoughts didn't really uh progress much during the last few years um there are many many sessions on smith in different uh ht conference many many papers published and of course i can understand that people want to work on smith because it's very rewarding and pleasant uh but maybe we reach a point where uh we need to to think about that um for example um i had a discussion with an editor of a

14:23specific journal in ht and he told me that uh smith scholarship smith was a topic on which he received by far the most important number of submissions but it was also the topic on which our the lowest rate of acceptance and the harshest reviewers so it can be tough to work on smith uh everyone knows that and uh yeah um of course i'm not against people celebrating smith anniversary but

14:55from my own point of view uh yeah maybe we should slow a bit um i don't know maybe maybe i'm biased too because um it might be the consequence of my own i would say a complicated relationship with smith now uh the patient has gone and um in a way i've lost the feeling of wonder surprise and admiration i had in reading me and uh i'm no more excited in reading other great economists and philosophers because they make me feel again this pleasure of new discovery so i don't find this new

15:28these 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 i will try to to remember to ask you that question in 10 years and we'll see how how the situation has changed since since then um i suggest that we move to um another topic because you send us also a paper titled rolls maximin and optimal taxation

15:59theory 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 walls use it in a theory of justice and what is optimal taxation theory okay um well the maximin criterion is a criterion derived from all second principle of justice a difference principle which is well

16:33known from economists to focus almost exclusively on on that um the maximin criterion says that inequalities are just when they are to the maximum benefit of the least advantage in terms of uh primary goods and so uh as to your second question optimal taxation theory is a branch of public economics that seeks to determine our government should design tax systems to achieve specific economic and social

17:04objectives 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 which is at the heart of uh the paper in a way because i'm reviewing uh some paper in the early history of optimal taxation theory and that was a very important question for phelps atkinson and

17:41other even for millies the pioneer paper on optimal taxation theory in this particular paper um at least historically speaking we're situated kind of like before and after the 70s so 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 um there are actually two important changes that you flag in your paper and we would like to know uh what you could tell us about those changes and in this in this kind of soup like how is

18:18rawls relevant why were taxation theorists so drawn to rawls's ideas okay um well i think that before this emergence of the optimal taxation theory what we had was uh principles of public finance so the main textbook was musgrave was musgrave which is used by holes in a theory of justice um public finance offered some abstract normative principles of taxation uh whose practical application for public

18:50policy were not clear that was the main uh 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 but even if you look at the benefit principle you cannot claim for sure that it uh legitimates some progressive taxation and so on and even better it doesn't tell you if you have to to put a maximum marginal rate of i don't know 40 percent or 50 percent or 55 etc

19:27so um the emergence of optimal taxation theory was quite important because some economics began using the tools of neoclassical economics optimization 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 um uh james smearly's 1971 paper on optimal income taxation

20:03which was the pioneer of work on optimal taxation um he already had uh contributed to uh public economics with diamond but it was more i think on commodity taxation if i remember well um and then it was uh as uh as you mentioned uh was uh the publication of also theory of justice um what was is so important because um prior to rule theory of justice um the only or the dominant um criterion of social welfare was the

20:43the utilitarian criterion criterion of maximizing social utility and so economists saw in world theory of justice um an alternative to uh utilitarianism and it was you know 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 uh in agreement with what holds that in mind but anyway that's why for many reasons that i'll explain

21:18in the paper they decided to to use a welfarist interpretation of the maximing criterion in order to see if um other um approaches of social social justice and fairness could provide um different results on uh tax uh optimal income taxation and margin yeah top marginal tax rate etc and the progressiveness of uh income taxation thank you uh there are many influences also on marx's ideas you argue that

21:53benthamid democratic and egalitarian ideas all influenced more a rose theory of justice to which was rose most uh most loyal uh most loyal according to you thank you sheena so yeah i had to plug in my computer um well i think it's difficult to say maybe democratic and even more egalitarian ideas are very important for for all um of course the rose was and is still first and foremost a liberal

22:29the first principle of justice as a lexical priority was a second and i think that is mixed or of or is kind of compromised between liberalism and egalitarianism is part of its success during the 20th century and still today for people who are looking for um yeah some kind of reconciliation between liberalism and egalitarianism and egalitarianism or socialism etc uh but for sure the what what i can say that once he was the least loyal was benthamitidis the project of course was to provide a true

23:06alternative to utilitarianism even though in the beginning in the 1950s and 60s early 60s he was still influenced by by utilitarianism but then he really decided to uh to provide an alternative to that and uh it was quite critical also in the theory of justice of welfare economics the application of utilitarianism innovative economics so ironically most of his legacy in economics come from welfare economics uh yes it's really hard to work on roles also i tried once um as economists uh what is the message

23:45we should take away from ross's work then uh well i think there are many messages we can take away from him um of course he was not the first but uh he helped economies to think about uh uh 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 uh the way he tries to define a criterion of

24:21just inequality so the maximum uh 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 economics uh like it because in a way that uh the maximum of equality compatible with efficiency so uh it can explain to why it was so successful among the economics um and third i think uh what is interesting in roles is that um he tries to think what a good fair just and ecologically sustainable

24:57socio-economic system is or could be so that's an important lesson for us today i really think that economists should spend more time to uh understand and defend what they think is a good economic system we will talk about that maybe later if we talk about piketty okay but before speaking of piketty uh i would like to uh speak about our archives because you rely on this piece uh on archival materials and i would like to

25:32know if you have some um some things to tell us about your own relationship to archival work well uh i love it for sure um i find something quite romantic in archival work i don't know if it's the same for other people but especially when you work on really old stuff and papers um i've always done each it the old way i would say by reading and analyzing text and identifying concepts and so on but

26:06so 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 francois kenney

26:19there i studied unpublished manuscripts and correspondence from the end of mirabeau and his copyists of fully his copies because um just transcribing uh mirabeau's manuscript can be a tough exercise because his handwriting is very hard to read but 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

26:52unpublished manuscripts different version of paper and books that's what i found for example for the paper on rose maximin i found different version of many different versions of atkinson's paper on progressive taxation in the 1970s i also am looking for correspondence and so on or everything that can help to improve our understanding of um an author's economic series so my interest and end is mainly uh analytical i don't care much about anecdotal and

27:26biographical stuff and so um if i follow miss meta reasoning what in still again um i think that archival work can be full of wonder and surprise of unexpected discoveries especially after long hours of unfruitful research because it's also that the work on archives uh hopefully i love searching and digging and i'm patient and persistent um and so i think that the the specific charm of archives

27:57comes from the the feeling of intimacy you have the sentiment of um 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 as a prime example and recent example i could mention my experience working on morisale's papers in saint clou it is a private phone all by his daughter christine allais who presides now the morisale foundation

28:29and 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 uh morisale's office on his own papers i have a follow-up question to what you just said you mentioned that you like to do history of economic thought the old way um 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

29:00uh well i don't know if there is a new way of doing a city maybe what i would call a new way is to use uh a different method for example qualitative methods uh all this project on all histories is very interesting for example and uh even in my own research i try to uh integrate now some interviews when i can so maybe we'll discuss that later but uh i've interviewed pkt and many people around him to to know better and to improve my my papers and the second kind of new history of

29:36economic thought which is quite interesting too is the use of quantitative method of course or bibliometric methods and that too i tried to integrate but with the help of research engineers i have to admit so we made some analyses of co-authorship and co-citation and so on so you can also of course use digital humanities for analyzing some big corpus of uh very long and very long text many pages so it goes in yeah there are some very very interesting things so so when i was a student it was a long time

30:12ago and we didn't have access to that so i don't know i didn't know how to do it but i tried to to learn that too because i think it's important ah so not so much uh not so much skepticism so much as they're just uh different ways of approaching how to do history um but you mentioned pickety and i did want to ask you about your paper uh it came out in 2023 in the erasmus journal for philosophy and economics called ideologies and utopia a recurring reading of thomas pickety and i've got a first

30:45question about about vocabulary which is what's what's the difference between ideology and utopia

30:55well um to explain it i will use a weaker sword because i think it's quite pertinent on this question uh for weaker ideology and utopia are the two inseparable facets of social imaginations so these two idealities are the art of our social imagination and they establish our collective identity so for weaker every society needs a representation of its own identity

31:23and so no representation of social order is possible without ideology and utopia so for weaker ideology needs utopia and vice versa um we always need utopia and its fundamental function of contestation and projection into radical elsewhere to cure the rigidity and purification 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 weaker it's impossible to imagine a society without utopia because it will be a

32:01a society without purpose utopia is a kind of escape from uh 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 weaker is that uh um there are necessary non-conformity with social and historical reality uh but ideology exercises a kind of resistance to change and aims at preserving the past order while

32:35utopia is oriented towards the future and brings about change breaking through uh what he calls the sickness of reality

32:44and i was curious about uh some details about piketty's project he tells us that history consists uh in a struggle of ideologies towards an end that's marked by equality and he offers a kind of socialism as a normative suggestion um this is participatory socialism and i wanted to ask what is participatory socialism and how is it different from other socialisms

33:08okay um well i've been working on piketty for a few years now i'm still working on him um i had the chance to meet him recently so uh after reading my latest working paper on him he kindly invited me to have lunch and to it was a great expense for me because yeah i could ask him many questions i had about his works 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 uh so um i i first uh start i

33:43started working on piketty uh in 2000 i think in 2019 or early 2020 um when he tried to elaborate a theory of social justice uh in the ultimate chapter of capital and ideology and to identify what kind of socio-economic system might uh sustain it and so uh to answer your question participatory socialism is uh piketty's ideal socio-economic system i'm not sure it's revolutionary and uh it

34:18really overcomes capitalism as he pretends it so there is some debate about that and we can discuss it of course um it's more kind of uh 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 uh he defends a wide range of free public services measures for uh economic democracy etc then he added uh in subsequent works uh some references to

34:55cooperatives commons the job guarantee universal uh basic income so the old package of the left and um well the idea i think the main idea of piketty is to favor a wide circulation of private property and what's among the population rather than an abolition of private property per se in order to avoid that some people become very rich and state uh forever in the first piece i wrote on him i said somewhat provocatively that he was not a socialist so of course he did not like it and uh he answered then

35:30in the same journal um at least this 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 uh rose theory of justice of course solidarism french solidarism the idea of property earning democracy but also uh it was influenced by uh the series of deliberative democracy

36:00very interesting uh thank you benoit perhaps you can um 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 uh well um i think that he insists a lot on uh as you know maybe in capital and ideology on the role of the struggle of ideology as a driver of

36:33history and so uh logically was accused especially by marxist communist and anti-capitalist in general of being an idealist who forgets about uh the fundamental role of material forces social struggles strikes and so on so he tried to answer that in uh uh different answers to specific issues on the book but for sure i think piketty doesn't seem to understand capital or he doesn't want to understand capital as a social and domination uh relationship as massive uh do and so he has a kind of very

37:09orthodox or neoclassical view of capital or no real concept of capital at all marxist would argue i refer here for example to a famous conference uh in french between uh frédéric lordon and uh thomas piketty uh it was organized by the newspaper lumanity and uh lordon who is a great uh rhetorician's orator uh began his presentation of piketty's capital and ideology saying okay this is a book called

37:42capital and ideology and there is no concept of capital and no concept of ideal ideology too so it's a bit harsh of course uh but yeah i i think that's something you can uh read especially from the to the left and especially from marxists when they read piketty and you talk about paul ricoeur also uh what made you think of writing a recurring interpretation of piketty how does ricoeur figure into the argument how does reading

38:18ricoeur help us to understand piketty better well um the starting point is the fact that uh piketty in capital and ideology uh had offered a very broad and unspecified conception of ideology i was not satisfied with um piketty defined ideologies as uh 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

38:56society 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 expressing an idea of social justice so i turned to paul ricker because i was looking for more substantive and philosophical account of the concept of ideology and ricker provided a

39:26kind of three level of analysis of ideology so he says that there are different uh more more or less deep uh level of uh ideologies the first level is dissimulation the marxian concept then there is a the view of ideology the middle level is domination and the main level for for ricker is the main aim of ideology is conservation of social order so i find in ricker a very nice analysis of

39:58ideologies of ideologies and more importantly of the dialectics of ideology and utopia which i think can be a footfully applied to to piketty to enrich his thought in particular ricker tried to define what are good utopias ricker argues that good utopias are practical political utopias actualizing latent potentialities from the past and present and aiming at effectively transforming social order

40:33white bad ones would be utopias which are an escape from reality or some kind of dreams of a perfect though unrealizable sorry society often based on an unrealistic view of human nature and history and i think that uh this idea of kind good utopia as it is described by ricker by ricker can be found in piketty and his project of participative socialism

41:05okay and now we arrive uh i think to to the last question not specifically uh targeted at one of the pieces you sent us uh because you have been involved as many of us have here uh in co-writing pieces such as the book you mentioned at the beginning uh of our talk with andreas altman on adam smith and we would like to ask you about your experience with co-authorship well um maybe i'm a lucky guy but i always had some positive uh mutually beneficial and uh sometimes

41:44great experiences in co-authorship uh 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 uh i even published a paper with someone i never seen face to face but uh yeah some of them are now friends at least from my own point of view um importantly i think it reminds us that our work though often quite solitary is collaborative and cooperative all along and that what counts in the

42:22end 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 i think thanks to laurie brebon thanks to laurie who was also doing a phd on smith at far in paris and she gave me the email address my email address to andreas i think and then he

42:55contacted 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

43:11the main manuscript the 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 he's a 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 an affiliated with others so andreas is a very nice and generous guy and i'm i'm very happy to have known him thanks to our project and

43:42common love for adam smith and uh to finish also on a positive point um even when the collaboration was not quite successful from an academic point of view it was usually a good experience for example with china we made an application for a grant of the cnrs in france with a very interesting project on imagination in economics and uh that unfortunately it wasn't successful but through that i learned to know china much better and to realize the beautiful person she is what an incredibly lovely way

44:20to 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 and of course everyone go read your roles and go make some friends benoit thank you very much for stopping by today thank you to you thank you also and i still believe that one day we will

44:52succeed uh to get some founding for this project because i'm still working on it on it so i keep hope there's a there's a uh a thing that i want to mention i know somebody in philosophy of science who is working on imagination uh in science so i don't know if this uh i i i i saw him like a couple a few years ago at a conference but he may be someone that you may be interested in talking to so i'll send along his project information for you actually i'm writing a paper the paper of related to that project and i'll

45:28present it in glasgow in the 250th anniversary of adam smith in glasgow because it was accepted i send it the abstract i'm not an adam smith scholar as you mentioned today uh i'm a newcomer to adam smith studies i had an idea i uh send it the abstract and i already worked when uh with benoit we were talking about the project we worked on it a little bit so then i'm writing the papers i will meet all adam smith

46:01scholar in glasgow this year i'm so excited about it and i hope that the project will see the 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 have this opportunity to collaborate yeah i hope it too so we encourage people to to discuss with us if they are interesting in our project join us again next month for another episode of smiths

46:37and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics podcast