Dr. Jeffrey Young to speak on Adam Smith at the Piskor Lecture on Mon 4/13@7:30 p.m.

This year's campus celebration of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments will conclude on Monday April 13th at 7:30 p.m in Herring-Cole Hall with  A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics Jeffrey T. Young presenting "Justice, Property and Markets: Economics as Moral Philosophy."

Young states of his project, "Adam Smith (1723-1790) is generally credited as the founder of the modern discipline of economics, because of his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). However, Smith was a moral philosopher by profession, and he was already widely known in his day as the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).  My Piskor Lecture will, in part, contribute to the celebration of Smith's too-long neglected first book."

The lecture, Young says, will continue a long-standing research program which considers the possible links between the two books. "In short, the project is about the interrelationships between what are now two distinct academic disciplines, moral philosophy and economics. I use Adam Smith's works as a template for what these interconnections might be, and more importantly, their significance for the modern practice of economics."

A graduate of the University of Maine, Young earned the Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. He has been on the faculty at St. Lawrence since 1980 and was named Hepburn Professor of Economics in 1995. He is the author of Classical Theories of Value from Smith to Sraffa (1978) and Economics as a Moral Science: The Political Economy of Adam Smith (1997).