> As Adam Smith said, the true price of everything is in human labor.
Cite?
Also who died and made Adam Smith's word synonymous with fact?
Last I checked the true price of anything is the price I have to pay to acquire it, which is incidentally more in line with Adam Smith's actual quote which was: "The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.". The price I have to pay to acquire something translates to money, that I gained through "toil and trouble" so to speak. Quite far from the true price of everything being human labour.
Wealth of nations, book 1, actually. "toil and trouble" could be interpreted as "labour". I certainly take that interpretation.
though Smith really didn't make much use of the labour theory of value, as he thought it would be less relevant in an advanced economy. Riccardo and especially Marx developed and used it much more. (For Marx see the first part of Capital)
> Wealth of nations, book 1, actually. "toil and trouble" could be interpreted as "labour". I certainly take that interpretation.
You are free to interpret it any way you like, but then taking your interpretation and saying that is what Adam smith was trying to say, when it is quite literally not what he said, nor even close to what he said, is called lying, and that is not really okay.
There's no need for interpretation, Smith makes it quite clear with nearly an entire chapter dedicated to it:
> The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.
> It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.
> But though labour be the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities, it is not that by which their value is commonly estimated.
The idea of "value" independent of price is something treated by Marx as a normative claim that neither Adam Smith or Ricardo developed. When Ricardo or Adam smith talked of "value", they just meant "price" but in some notional unit of currency which was irrelevant to the discussion at hand. E.g. they wanted to discuss prices in a barter economy.
Adam Smith explored the labor theory of value in the context of primitive societies with fixed capital. In that case, you do get prices scaled to labor inputs, as capital is constant.
Ricardo tried to develop more sophisticated models than those with fixed capital, but did not have the tools to determine price setting, and finally admitted "I am not satisfied with the explanation I have given of the principles which regulate value.".
It wasn't until economists started using math more seriously and included production functions and utility functions that they were able to formulate a more general theory of price setting involving marginal costs and benefits. This allowed the creation of numerical estimates for things like price elasticity that provided useful information for price setting and allowed (in some cases) for falsifiability and even laboratory experimentation. See the famous experiments of Vernon Smith, for which he won a Nobel Prize. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/SmithV.html
Thus standard economics was able to go bit beyond the thought experiments of Ricardo and Smith whereas Marx continued the process of philosophically musing about value in a normative sense, now removed from any actually observed prices, and far off into the world of political economy rather than economics per se.
Unfortunately none of the modern economic theories apply to real estate, because it is a land market in disguise and has little to do with housing.
Price of land is determined when looking at the world as a whole (margin of production), so it can't be measured in a simple microeconomic laboratory experiment.
It can actually be studied using models, but one would have to go back to Smith and Ricardo and add the third factor of production (land) back into the equation. Which was removed by marginalists for simplification to study simple markets of bananas and yogurts.
The modern economic foundations simply don't have the tools to study land markets, so they will always fall into the trap of a drunk man looking for keys under the lamppost only.
Honestly, I am disappointed with Marx. For every day people only two things really matter. Fix money (usury and debt) and land. Once you do that, there is no need for a communist utopia.
Cite?
Also who died and made Adam Smith's word synonymous with fact?
Last I checked the true price of anything is the price I have to pay to acquire it, which is incidentally more in line with Adam Smith's actual quote which was: "The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.". The price I have to pay to acquire something translates to money, that I gained through "toil and trouble" so to speak. Quite far from the true price of everything being human labour.