Philip Spires
http://www.philipspires.co.uk
Migwani is a small town in Kitui District, Kenya. My African novels, Mission and A Fool´s Knot examine how social, cultural and economic change impact on the lives of ordinary people in Migwani. They portray characters whose identity and futures are influenced by the distant globalised world. Themes addressed in Mission and A Fool´s Knot include economic and social change, religion, genital mutilation and initiation, liberation versus traditional theology, development and tradition.Proverbially, the horse's mouth is always the best source. Academically, primary material is usually the most reliable. So now what is to be found by revisiting a major work of the past, a work whose current iconic status has provided a multiplicity of quotes and endless justification of current positions? In the case of Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations, what can be gained now
from revisiting the text is enlightenment, a great deal of surprise and yet another realisation that when sophistication is reduced to mere icon, it is often not only the detail that is lhe acquisition of such talents (the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants and members of the society), by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person... The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with ere then is human capital, but also recognition of education as an investment, both personal and societal. He also thus stated the labour theory of The real value of all the different component parts of price... is measured by the quantity of labour which they can... purchase or command. Labour measures the value, not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labour, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit... In the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages or maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the mith also differentiated clearly between the use value and the exchange value of a good. A hundred years later, Marx would begin Das Kapital with a similar analysis. Smith's assertion that the tradable price of a good covered three areas of cost - labour, rent and profit - also opened up two important issues. A century later Marx would cite greed as a reason why those who controlled capital - the life-blood of trade - could seek to maximise the profit element of the cost of a good, a practice that would inevitably lead to the increased exploitation of the labour involved, since their contribution to the cost could be controlled, even depressed. And in Smith's own analysis the likely effects of price rises in a good would be to put up rents, thus eventually benefiting landlords and landowners. Thus even in Smith's work, those who represented the more powerful interests would be the ones to reap the lion's share of the benefits of trade, even the lion's share of growth in the economy or expansion of trade.
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