Wealth of nations by Adam Smith Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Wealth of nations by Adam Smith - Term Paper Example Written by Adam Smith in 1776,readers of today find the book â€Å"Wealth of Nations† almost impenetrable since the language used is flowery and the terminologies are outmoding yet wander into digressions.In spite of that, this book is one of the world’s most important books because it did for economics what Newton and Darwin did for physic and biology. Adam took what seemed outdated in trade and commerce then used public policy and his wisdom to re-state all these facts into complete, fresh, and new principles that people use fruitfully centuries later (Smith, 2010). In his work, Adam outlined gross domestic product concept for measuring wealth of a nation through identification of huge gains of productivity facilitated by specialization. He recognized benefits of trade, automatic market mechanism as well as the collaborated wide and fertile resources that provided great efficiency. Consequently, it is these ideas that make the basic fabric economic science that we adh ere to up to date. This book inquires about the nature and causes of a nation’s wealth. In book one, chapter five, Adam expounds on real and nominal price of products and their prices of labor and money. In simple terms, Adam believes that every man is wealthy or poor. This status depends on the degree in which a man can afford to enjoy the conveniences, necessities, and the amusements of life. Nevertheless, after taking thorough division of labor, this degree value these fruits as a very small part with which a man’s own labor can afford to supply him. ... The real worth of a product that a man acquired and wants to tender or simply exchange it for another product is the burden that he can spare himself and impose it on others. Labor purchases whatever a man can buy with money or with products as much as what a man can possess through the sweating and troubling of his own body. Nonetheless, the availability of goods or money that a man can use to purchase a product indeed saves him toil and trouble as these goods contain quantity of certain value of labor that one can exchange for what is of the same amount at that time to obtain a value of an equal measure. At first, labor was the original purchase money paid for all things. Therefore, what originally purchased the world’s wealth is not gold or silver, but labor. Surprisingly, wealth is power. However, whoever acquires wealth or succeeds to great fortune, does not entitle him to any political power may it be military or civil. The power may perhaps afford the person both milita ry and civic power but his or her mere power possession does not necessarily convey to him or herself. In this case, this person only possess the power of immediate or direct purchasing a certain command over all the available labor or over labor produce that is in the market by then. This person’s fortune is greater or lesser according to the proportion to the extent of power that enables this person to purchase or command the quantity of other people’s produce of labor. Thus, everything’s exchangeable value must be precisely same to the extent of power, which it conveys to its owner at all times. Even though labor is the real measure of value of exchange of all commodities, it is not labor which commonly estimates the value of commodities since it is not easy to