Specialization of labor is very important to Adam Smith--so important, in fact, that it is the first subject that he addresses in detail in Wealth of Nations. He claims in the first chapter of the book that specialization provides the "greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour." To illustrate his point, he famously used what he called a "trifling manufacture," the production of pins. One person carrying out all of the tasks necessary to manufacture a pin would have a very low output over the course of a workday. But by dividing this task into a number of very small tasks--drawing out the wire, cutting it, grinding it down, and so on, each performed by a single worker, Smith calculates that thousands of pins can be produced. Smith says that the same principle holds true no matter what is being manufactured:
The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour.
The reasons this statement is true, Smith argues, are that there is an "increase in dexterity [skill] in every...workman" that results from practicing the same task over and over; that workers will not waste time by transitioning from one task to another; and that, by allowing people to focus on one task, division of labor allows for people to devise new ways to get better at that task. This includes, Smith argues, the invention of machines equipped to do the task. So the development of technology is in part the result as well as the cause of division of labor. Smith understands, however, that the effects of specialization of labor on workers could be bad inasmuch as the worker is stuck performing a boring task over and over. This is one reason that he insists on public education--to create good citizens as well as good workers.
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