The Digression on the Value of Silver in Chapter 11 of Book 1 is one of the longest and most difficult chaptersin Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

I delayed publishing Book 1 of my simplified version of The Wealth of Nationsand published Books 2 & 3 instead because paraphrasing the Digression in Book 1 would require some time and effort.

The first step is to organize the Digression which starts at Paragraph 96 and ends at Paragraph 239. For reference, I used both the 'capitalist' econlib version and the 'socialist' marxist.org version

Digression

• Periods

  • First Period

  • Second Period

  • Third Period

    • Growth of Silver Demand

      • Market of Europe

      • Market of America

      • Market of Asia

• Variations In Values Of Gold And Silver

  • Grounds Of The Suspicion That The Value Of Silver Still Continues To Decrease

• Effects Of The Progress Of Improvement on Three Sorts Of Rude Produce

  • First Sort

  • Second Sort

  • Third Sort

• Conclusion of Digression

Smith wanted to prove that gold and silver prices are not correlatedwith the wealth or poverty of society. Instead, he wanted to prove that it is the money price of some rude produce relative to the main food grain (such as wheat), which is the clearest indicator of a society's wealth or poverty.

To do this, he had to:

• talk about the price of wheat (rude produce) in three periods
• talk about the price of silver in the world and its ratio to gold
• talk about the nature of the price of rude produce

In the same way, we want to objectively prove that GDP (measured in dollars) is not a proof of the wealth of a country, so we follow Smith's methodology in getting the 'grain values' of key rude produce to easily say whether the US or China or the EU is really wealthier and which country's wealth is based more on real value, instead of fake or nominal value. Who wouldn't want to live in a country that has more real value and is more resistant to economic crises?

SORAnomics uses two measures combined to replace GDP as a measure of a country's wealth:

• Purchasing Power (Supply Side)
• Ratio of commodities to grain or Grain index(Demand Side)

Purchasing power is the net revenue from GDP or gross revenue of a society. It is made up of the net profits that go to the wallets of business owners, and wages that goes to the wallets of employees. The expenses for interest payments, fees, etc. are deducted from the computation of net revenue. For example, the GDP or gross revenue of Singapore is nominally $323.9 b. Its purchasing power would be the GDP minus tax payments to government and the cost of money used up in producing that GDP.

This cost of money is the expense in financing the money to be used to circulate value in any economy. In order to buy bread, I have to work for money and then use the money to buy bread. If my work could be bartered directly for bread, then money would not be neededand all the bankers, financiers, ATMs, bank branches, etc could be freed up and made to do other things useful for society.

There are three ways to arrive at Purchasing Power

1. Directly from receipts of the fair tax system  or by getting the values from fulfilled social contracts in the SORA system. This is the automated way
2. Top Down by computing it out of the GDP. This technique will likely be used in the mainstream
3. Bottom up by estimating the changes in the purchases of a sample population or sector. This will be done through a suvrvey of what people bought this month compared to last month and will likely be used by the societies that cannot automate. For example:
   Individual PP = Quantity and Quality of Goods and Services that can be bought by a person, pegged in either gold or grain
   National PP = Summation of Individual PP
   National PP per capita = National PP divided by population

The Grain index, as stated in the Digression is the ratio of the price of commodities to the price of grain.   For example:

• If a kilo of rice in the Philippines $0.75 and a kilo of chicken is $2.50 then 1 rice : 0.33 chicken.
• If a kilo of rice in Vietnam is $0.50 and chicken is $5, then 1 rice : 0.10 chicken.

So it means that chicken is really cheaper in the Philippines, meaning that while Vietnamese enjoy cheaper rice, Filipinos enjoy luxuries better (to Smith, meat is a luxury). This is consistent if we replace chickens with cars. A Toyota Vios is 16,000 kg rice in the Philippines, but 44,250 kg rice in Vietnam. This would then guide people on which cities or countries they might want to move to, in order to match their social status, fulfilling the requirement of Adam Smith that our model must have a practical use. The rich could use this to justify moving to Singapore, while the lower classes might use it to decide to live in the Philippines or Vietnam.

This model can of course be used for policymaking. Both Economics and SORAnomics will conclude that Singapore is the most prosperous country and Vietnam the least prosperous of the three, from the supply side. But from the demand side, SORAnomics can reveal much more info:

• The poor of Vietnam are 'wealthier' than the poor of the Philippines (which is really the poorest)
• The middle class of Vietnam is the poorest of the three
• The rich of the Philippines are more prosperous than that of Singapore
• Because the poor benefit in Vietnam, the policies are likely pro-poor and anti-rich, consistent with Communism
• Because the rich benefit in the Philippines, the policies are likely pro-rich and anti-poor, consistent with oligarchy

So by combining supply side GDP or Purchasing Power and demand side Grain index, we can get a more granular picture of the real economic situation of a society. By plotting the ratios of prices of different products and services relative to the Grain index annually, we can even determine the economic direction of a society and can better iron out kinks in a society's supply and demand. We can even use the data to plot exactly when the grain ratios started to change to then pinpoint specific laws that caused the problem or improvement. We can trace objectively when the oligarchy started in the Philippines and when Vietnam became anti-rich, by getting their historical annual SORAnomic Purchasing Power even without any knowledge of historical events -- this is what our machine learning is supposed to do.

The Big Mac index has some of the basic ideas of Smith's commodity-based valuation system, explained in the Digression, as it uses a real, useful thing to valuate a mere piece of paper with a number written on it.

In contrast, modern Economics measures the supply-side as gross supply or GDP (Gross product), and measures demand-side as CPI or nominal consumer prices measured in currency. This makes it difficult to value goods and services during bubbles and hyperinflation, causing a disruption in the supply chain like what happened in Zimbabwe. If a financial crisis hits a SORA system, the valuation can merely switch to the Grain index to keep the supply chain humming.

Under Economics, a country can theoretically have a single giant corporation exporting everything, having huge GDP while its workers starve to produce those exports at low cost. A GDP standard would still rate the starving country as wealthy. Our dual system, on the other hand, would properly expose the real poverty hidden by the nominal wealth just as it exposed the hidden middle-class poverty in Vietnam and the real poverty in the Philippines. In addition, our dual index eliminates the need for complicated subjective factors that are present in other indices like the Human Development Index, Happy Planet Index, Better Life Index, etc. The subjetiveness is only in what items are pegged aganst the Grain index.