## Metaveri Başlık: **Gadgets and Gizmos That Inspired Adam Smith** Yazar: *Virginia Postrel* Kategori: #articles ## Altı Çizilenler - We evaluate such desires as irrational only when we're sick or depressed, he suggested. In a good mood, we care less about the practical costs and benefits than about the joys provided by "the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system….The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety." - It was nothing less than the source of civilization itself: "It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth." - The same aesthetic impulse that draws people to ingenious trinkets and leads them to pursue wealth and greatness, he argued, also inspires projects for public improvements, from roads and canals to constitutional reforms. However worthwhile one's preferred policies might be for public welfare, their benefits—like those of a pocket globe—are secondary to the beauty of the system. - "What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility," Smith wrote, "as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number." Toys embodied *aptness*, "the beauty of order, of art and contrivance." They were ingenious and precise. They were cool. And they weren't the only objects of desire with these qualities. - The same pattern applied, Smith argued, to the idea of wealth. He portrayed the ambitious son of a poor man, who imagines that servants, coaches, and a large mansion would make his life run smoothly. Pursuing a glamorous vision of wealth and convenience, he experiences anxiety, hardship, and fatigue. Finally, in old age, "he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys."