Adam Smith’s allegory: the lottery of life

In my previous post, we saw what I like to call “Adam Smith’s allegory” or the “The Allegory of the Lottery” in Book I, Chapter 10 of The Wealth of Nations, where Smith describes the probability that one will have successful career as a kind of lottery. Sometimes the odds of this lottery are fair. Sometimes they are not. And then I concluded my previous post with Smith’s prescient observation about “the natural confidence which every man has more or less, not only in his own abilities, but in his own good fortune.” (WN, I.x.23, p. 123) As it happens, the father of economics has a lot more to say about lotteries and about “[t]he contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success” in the remainder of Book I, Chapter 10 of his magnum opus. (See especially paragraphs 26 to 33 of Book I, Chapter 10.) For now, however, I just want to point out how Smith’s allegorical lottery metaphor and his observation about the ubiquity of self-deception poses many intriguing, and perplexing,…