Michelle Albert Vachris, professor of economics at Christopher Newport University, will present a talk based on her recent co-authored book Pride and Profit: The Intersection of Jane Austen and Adam Smith. Adam Smith was a mid-18th-century philosopher who is best known as the founder of modern economics. His work on economics and trade policy was built on his earlier work on moral philosophy, namely his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
This book constructs a system for understanding how humans acquire and apply moral reasoning to daily life, in pursuit of a good life. A good life depends on developing habits of virtue and propriety that direct and controls one’s ambition, both in commercial and an ethical life. Writing a half-century after Smith, Jane Austen’s novels similarly provide timeless insight into the practice of virtues and vices. Austen presents themes of self-command, of being other-directed, and of cultivating prudence, benevolence, and justice against vanity, pride, and greed. Vachris has written about Austen’s novels as reflecting Smith’s ideas on self-command, prudence, benevolence, justice, impartiality, vanity, pride, and greed. Importantly, by channeling Adam Smith, Austen’s colorful stories and characters advance new insights into Smith, as they embellish, refine, and further explain his ideas.
About the Speaker: Michelle Albert Vachris is Professor of Economics at Christopher Newport University. She earned a B.A. in Economics from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University. Before arriving at CNU, she was an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the International Price Program where she worked on export and import price indexes and purchasing power parities. She has since served as a consultant on international statistics for the BLS and the International Monetary Fund. Dr. Vachris is a past-president and Distinguished Fellow of the Virginia Association of Economists and co-editor of the Virginia Economic Journal. Her publications include articles and book chapters on public choice economics, teaching pedagogy and economics in literature. Her latest publication is Pride and Profit: the Intersection of Jane Austen and Adam Smith co-authored with Cecil E. Bohanon.
