Scots, Wha Hae

11 May 2006 at 1:36 pm Peter G. Klein 3 comments

| Peter Klein |

Today's Wall Street Journal features a front-page profile of a Carnegie-Mellon student majoring in bagpipes, thought to be the only such student in the US. This prompts a confession I've long wanted to make: I'm half Scottish. My mother was born and raised in Freuchie, a tiny village of just north of Edinburgh. While Scottish eccentricities are ripe for satire (ask Monty Python or Mike Myers), we also deserve credit for the steam engine, penicillin, pneumatic tires, the telephone, and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Speaking of the latter, though no one doubts the importance of Smith, Hume, Hutcheson, Ferguson, Steuart, Kames, and the rest, the Scots have been getting a bad rap lately. Murray Rothbard famously and controversially called Adam Smith overrated, describing the late Spanish Scholastics, Cantillon, Turgot, and the Physiocrats as better economists. Gertrude Himmelfarb's recent book The Roads to Modernity distinguishes sharply between Scottish and British achievements. (Hat tip to Nicolai.) Even Hayek, whose interpretation of Scottish thought is extremely influential, takes a drubbing in a recent paper arguing that Polanyi had the better grasp of "spontaneous order." (This paper disagrees.)

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Austrian Economics, Classical Liberalism, Recommended Reading.

Heavily Cited, But Wrong Higher Education in France

3 Comments Add your own

1. Peter Klein | 11 May 2006 at 4:10 pm

Update: Mom loves the post but insists that I add "tarmacadam, mackintosh raincoats, the bicycle, chloroform, television, and the King James Bible." How can I refuse?
2. Bo Nielsen | 11 May 2006 at 8:11 pm

Not to speak of Colin Mongomorie and my favorite “disinfectant”: Laphroaig!

Apparently during the American prohibition on alcohol they stopped importation of Scotch, but some of the most phenolic stuff (ie Laphroaig) managed to slip through the net: It was imported as a *disinfectant*. The customs authorities must have thought that nothing smelling like Laph. could be drunk for any other than medical purposes…

Laphroaig was the single best selling whisky legally during prohibition in the U.S. It was prescribed to those in need of medicinal alcohol (probably because it has been described as smelling of gauze)..

Cheers!
3. Organizations and Markets » The nature of the (family) firm | 15 May 2006 at 10:29 pm

[…] Brayden King at orgtheory.net has a nice post today about family-owned firms. He summarizes a recent sociology paper on the transformation of the Scottish [hooray!] shipbuilding industry from one of mostly family firms to one dominated by corporate firms. Writes Brayden: "Family businesses and corporations are clearly different creatures, but we [organizational scholars] usually just take the word of legal scholars in this matter. . . . My take-away is that, besides temporal continuity established through lines of heredity, the distinguishing feature of family firms is that affective relationships serves as the glue holding together various components of the business. This affect, which translates into close identification with the organization, is a distinctive competency of the family firm." […]