Seeking Adam Smith

The Dean of Harvard Business School, Nithin Nohria, declared that, "The public has lost trust in business, and some of our graduates seem to be responsible" for what former Federal Reserve Chair, Ben Bernanke, labelled as "the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression."

Great resources and effort have been expended to incorporate ethics and corporate social responsibility into business curricula since the Great Recession. The effectiveness of these efforts has been limited because they have little impact on the technical and core business courses that serve as the gateway to the highest paying jobs.

Additional, a shadow curriculum undermines the effectiveness of the formal curriculum. The formal curriculum is idealistic, coherent, and fully explicated. The shadow curriculum is practice, diffuse, informal, disjointed and is based on a view that Adam Smith proclaimed 'greed is good' because the invisible hand of free markets cleans up the mess.

Seeking Adam Smith demonstrates that this view is indeed false, and is not found in Wealth of Nations. Cox offers alternative economics perspectives that are more realistic and less politicised than those of neoclassical microeconomics which permeates the business curricula.