4/15/13

SLU's Economics Department to Host Robert Garnett April 22

Robert Garnett

CANTON - Robert Garnett, professor of economics at Texas Christian University, will give a lecture titled “Beneficence and Commerce: Adam Smith’s Unfinished Project” on Monday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m. in St. Lawrence University’s Hepburn Auditorium. The event is open to the public, free of charge, and refreshments will be served.

“Each individual in modern society ‘stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes,’ an observation made by Adam Smith, a Scottish economist and moral philosopher in the 18th century,” says Garnett.

“On standard interpretations of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the principal engine of voluntary assistance and cooperation beyond the family is market competition,” Garnett adds. “An examination of all of Smith’s work (including The Theory of Moral Sentiments) supports a broader view of social cooperation, rooted in the human propensities to trade and to empathize, and coordinated through diverse alloys of commercial and non-commercial exchange.”

Garnett has contributed to the philosophy and history of economics and economics education through publications across a broad spectrum of books, journals and edited volumes. His work examines the goals and methods of liberal learning in undergraduate economics education, the virtues of pluralism in economic inquiry, and the philanthropic and commercial dimensions of economic cooperation. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Studies in Emergent Order and the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education and as a contributing editor to Conversations on Philanthropy.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts. He held teaching positions at University of Southern Maine, Denison University and the University of Texas at Arlington before assuming his post at TCU.

The lecture is sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.