Adam Smith Division Of Labor
Throughout “Wealth of Nations,” an ongoing theme portrayed is economic growth. “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith,WN,159) For Smith, this quote backs up his idea of economic growth and that it stems from the division of labor, because in his opinion, labor is the true source of wealth. So what the dividing of the labor process does is that it takes a long process, and breaks the process down into sub-processes. In other words, the project is becoming specialized in the sense that there would be a worker that is assigned to each specific sub-process, which suits him best based on his skill set. Since each worker or workers were assigned to small subsets of the project, they were supposed to become an expert in that said area of the work, which would lead to an increase in efficiency. This idea was thought to bring about a productive environment, which would lead to the overall production of whatever the factory or company was making. In turn from this mass production of tangible objects, the labor will create a surplus that can then be reinvested into production by increasing the amount of technical and mechanical support that allows these companies to continue to grow. This in turn sets the stage for the economic growth that is talked about throughout the book. (Heilbroner,Malone,WN,153) Although I gave you a short synopsis of what the division of labor actually has done in the eyes of Smith, I will talk about it more in depth with different examples that smith gave us to show how remarkable this idea actually is. I will also talk about some of the downside that this may bring, but what I have realized is that the positives far outweigh the negatives. Smith first introduces four advantages that the