Week Four Post – Theresa
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Specialization of labor allows everyone to get more stuff.
“The division of labour…occasions, in every art, as proportionable increase of the productive powers.” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chp 1)
“Country workmen are almost every where obliged to apply themselves to all the different branches of industry that have so much affinity to one another as to be employed about the same sort of materials.” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chp 3)
When a person has to provide for himself in all aspects (growing his own corn, knitting his own sweaters, baking his own bread, hammering his own nails) he is only able to support himself. But people become more efficient if they only perform a specific task. Let’s say there are three individuals in a society. Each one produces “one” of everything they need, so that it is just enough for themselves to use. But if the first person begins to grow extra corn, and the second knits more sweaters, and the third bakes more bread, the other two can perform less of the tasks fulfilled by the specialized worker.
At a point where each person only does one thing, he can probably make “four” or “five” of that individual object, or more if he becomes even more specialized. By looking at the big picture of all the specialized people in an economy, if everyone produces more efficiently and each individual depends on others to provide the things he isn’t producing himself, the whole economy is producing more than if everyone wasn’t specialized.
The takeaway message from Smith appears to be that if we all want to have as much stuff as we possibly can, we should specialize more (and more, and more) and increase our efficiency at the specific type of labor we do. Then, as a collective society, we will produce a lot of stuff (which everyone wants, naturally) and each individual person can have more stuff than if we did not specialize.
This is a nice and clear description of how we get from point A (complete self-sufficiency) to point B (specialization and division of labor) in Smith. And I can tell that you realize that it’s problematic, too, when you write “Then, as a collective society, we will produce a lot of stuff (which everyone wants, naturally).” So: it’s a great start, and what I’d challenge you to do if you revise this in the future is start by dealing with your last paragraph: everyone wants stuff. But instead of writing, immediately, that everyone wants more stuff than they need, try for a more sympathetic reading of it. Why do we think we need so much stuff? How does it relate to our ability to specialize, as Smith thinks we should do?