Huang E personally came in with minced meat porridge and said to Wang Yuan: "Shangsi Festival will be in a few days. Mrs. Jin (Jin Lei's wife) invited our family to go for an outing in the countryside. Can you go far enough?"
Wang Yuan corrected the manuscript, nodded and said: "Go, I haven't moved around for a long time."
Huang E added: "Mrs. Jin's intention is to betroth Yuan'er of her family to Qi'er (Wang Qi) as his wife."
"Qi'er has reached the age of seventeen, and it is indeed time to arrange a marriage," Wang Yuan said. "We can take advantage of the holiday to go out and let the children talk among themselves. If they are in love, they can send a matchmaker to propose marriage. If any of them already has a sweetheart, they can also
Don't force yourself blindly, your children and grandchildren will have their own blessings."
"I can spare it." Huang E casually picked up a few manuscripts, but what caught his eye were the words "The Wealth of Nations".
Wang Yuan read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" in its entirety when he was in high school. He vaguely remembered some of the general content, but had long since forgotten all the details.
On the contrary, it is Marx's economic theory, productivity, means of production, production relations, surplus value... Wang Yuan remembers these things more clearly. He was once divided into liberal arts classes in high school, and the teacher taught them all in class, but he could memorize them by memorizing them.
Dawei, I kept studying and went to study science.
The Wealth of Nations written by Wang Yuan is partly derived from Adam Smith, partly from Marx, partly from various readings before time travel, and partly from political experience after time travel. It can be called a hodgepodge of political economics.
Huang E opened the first chapter [Introduction] and saw the manuscript saying:
"The state of the country and the use of the people are all obtained through work. If production and labor are abolished, the country will have no taxes to support, the people will have no food and clothing to live, and there is no such thing as getting something for nothing in the world... If the work is orderly and distributed in an appropriate manner, then
The country is rich and the people are strong; if the work is disordered and the distribution is irrational, the country will be poor and the people will be weak.”
"Artisans create things and farmers cultivate the land, which can be called labor. Merchants check whether goods are available and scholars write books and explain them, which can also be called labor."
"Working and producing requires people and things, both of which are indispensable. These are called the 'means of production'. In order to obtain food, someone must cultivate it, and there must also be land, seeds, agricultural tools, etc..."
"Human beings can be called 'producers'. The ability to create wealth can be named in terms of physics, and it is called 'productivity'. To put it into perspective, we can use factories to personify people and countries to personify them. Then we can talk about 'factories'
'Productivity', 'Productivity of the country'."
"How many feet can a woman weave day and night using an old-style spinning wheel? If she weaves cloth with a new-style spinning wheel, she can get several times the cloth. If she uses a steam engine to weave cloth, she can get a hundred times the cloth. The number of producers remains the same, but the wealth obtained
A sudden increase is called an increase in productivity."
"If you want to increase productivity, you can only improve one of the tools of production. Tools of production are things, "means of production," and people are also "means of production." The question is, can people be improved? They can certainly be improved!"
"If a scholar and an old farmer both cultivate an acre of land, who gets more food? A farmer and a salt farmer cook the same pot of brine, who gets more salt? People have specializations, and this difference in production skills improves production.
Skills can also improve productivity.”
"I also asked, why should we set up supervisors when building palace walls? It is to divide the work, not to let the laborers idle, and not to make the masons work as bricklayers. The higher the productivity, the more detailed the division of labor, which will be discussed in detail later.
Of."
"Human beings are not grass and trees, how can they be ruthless? If they work for nothing, they will be lazy and idle. Craftsmen in the Ming Dynasty, who served the government, had to live a happy life; to make a living for their own family, they worked hard and diligently. The same is true for kitchen households. They are lazy when cooking salt, and they are lazy when cooking salt.
Positive, because it is not profitable to make salt, and the remaining salt is the livelihood of the wife and children. This is called the enthusiasm for production, and the difference in household registration in the Ming Dynasty is one of the major constraints on productivity."
"The reason is that the distribution is uneven!"
"Across the world, the common people work hard to obtain food and clothing, and the government collects them to support the country. If there is no idle land in the world, farmers will starve to death; if all the industries in the country are prosperous, but the national treasury is still empty, this distribution has great disadvantages. What's the point of wealth?
Hidden? The powerful, the gentry, the powerful, the merchants. They are trying to seize the country from above and seize the interests of the people from below."
"It can be seen from this that there are three strategies for making the country prosperous and its people strong: first, smooth government decrees and orderly distribution; second, develop knowledge, promote skills, and improve productivity; third, gradually abolish household registration distinctions, gradually allow homeless people to exist, and try their best to
May liberate productivity..."
After reading the introduction, Huang E then read the main text of the first chapter.
Faced with a lot of terminology explanations, such as commodities, currency, labor, division of labor, market, capital, productivity, means of production, etc., Huang E couldn't help but laugh: "Are you going to become a businessman?"
Wang Yuan said: "I am writing a book that must be read by kings and ministers. This book is about managing the world and benefiting the people. It can be called 'economics'."
After the formation of human society, economics emerged naturally, but it has never formed a specialized knowledge.
The earliest economics work in the West should be the "Economia" of ancient Greece. The author was a student of Socrates, and it specifically discussed the economy of slave-owner families.
Plato and Aristotle also had some economic thoughts.
Aristotle, in particular, recognized that goods have two uses, one inherent in themselves and the other resulting from exchange. This idea was later developed by Adam Smith into "use value" and "exchange value."
After entering the Middle Ages, only theology was left in Europe, and economics became a part of theology. You can only imagine what it could develop into.
As for China, hundreds of schools of thought have economic thoughts. Xunzi also wrote a special article called "The Wealth of Nations", which influenced China for the next two thousand years.
The role of industry and commerce must be limited, but necessary restrictions must be placed on merchants. He believed that a rich country must enrich its people, so that both the top and bottom will be rich. This has become the mainstream since the Han Dynasty, but "enriching the people" is often out of shape.
Legalism is similar, making the country rich and its military strong, focusing on the basics and suppressing the weak. However, Shang Yang and Han Fei advocated "strengthening the country and weakening the people", retaining only basic wealth for the people, and crazily attacking industry and commerce.
Taoism, on the other hand, governs by doing nothing, letting nature take its course, and the government tries not to interfere with economic operations.
Wang Yuan's hodgepodge "The Wealth of Nations" has only three main ideas: limited state intervention; improving science and technology and refining division of labor; and liberating social human resources.
In terms of details, it proposes and explains various economic terms and briefly discusses the economic issues of various dynasties. It focuses on explaining the economic environment when the People's Republic of China was founded in the early Ming Dynasty, and the huge difference between the economic environment of the Zhengde and Shaofeng dynasties, which means that the terms should be used in different periods.
Different economic policies. In different provinces, economic policies should be appropriately adjusted to suit local conditions and the times.
As for the more in-depth content, Wang Yuan could not write it, and even if he could write it, readers would not be able to understand it. Because the social economy of the Ming Dynasty was still in the infancy of capitalism, many benefits and disadvantages have not yet been revealed.
Of course, Wang Yuan also focused on the issue of cotton eating people and silk eating people.
A large amount of farmland in Shandong has been converted to cotton, and a large amount of farmland in the south of the Yangtze River has been converted into mulberry fields. Now the economic situation has formed an economic situation of cotton in the north and mulberry in the south. This has not only led to regional food shortages, but also aggravated land mergers due to the boom in business. Rich households have acquired land through legal means. According to the fish scale records of each province
Looking at the changes, land annexation in Shandong, Zhejiang, and South Zhili provinces has been extremely serious in recent years, and individual wealthy businessmen have amassed millions of acres of land.
This resulted in a large number of landless peasants, some of whom became tenants and some who became vagrants. The urban population expanded rapidly, workers in transportation, docks and factories increased sharply, and overseas immigrants and merchant sailors also increased significantly. Local officials should speed up the process of "registration of vagrants" It is enacted to give these homeless people a legal identity and they can no longer be regarded as refugees, otherwise chaos will inevitably occur in the long run.
The whole book has only a few words, only more than 40,000 words, but Wang Yuan took a full year and a half to write it.
Qianqing Palace.
The accompanying eunuch held a hand-written and thread-bound book and said, "Your Majesty, this is a new manuscript presented by the Grand Tutor."
Zhu Zaiyi picked it up curiously and took a look. The title of "The Wealth of Nations" cheered him up. The introduction was just a summary, which already made the little emperor feel novel, and the detailed explanation of the text made him enlightened.
Wang Yuan wrote nearly 10,000 words on just one social division of labor. This was an economic thought that had never been done before.
Confucianism has always advocated focusing on agriculture and suppressing commerce, but Wang Yuan classified land and grain as means of production and commodities, and even land was a commodity.
After spending several days reading it, Zhu Zaiyi sighed and said: "I know why Mr. Physics is preaching. Physics students study the principles of all things and can create better machines. In this way, production efficiency can be improved and refinement can be achieved." The division of labor in society produces more wealth with less labor. The gentleman has not violated the words of the Confucian sages. The first policy of national wealth is to ensure smooth government decrees and the court interferes in economic operations to ensure the survival of the small people. Come... …”
"Your Majesty, my servant is here." The eunuch accompanying him bowed.
Zhu Zaiyi said: "I ordered the Secretary Li Jingjing Factory to print five thousand copies of Taifu's new book and distribute them to officials all over the world to read carefully."