Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #divisionoflabor
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#DivisionOfLAbor, we love it! Except it *does* make it a lot harder to provide for our own wants directly. We live by exchanging and cooperating with others. (I.iv.1) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
#AdamSmith is too smart to think all this exchanging and cooperating got worked out easily from the very beginning. There must have been bumps in the road. (I.iv.2) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
Butchers could have so much meat to trade with bakers/brewers that they could end up with an unusable surplus of bread/beer. That stalls trade. Smart people would work to have a supply of an always-useful trade item on hand. (I.iv.2) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets
Adam Smith famously begins #WealthofNations with a discussion on the #divisionoflabor. Few things are as impactful as #specialization within a market setting รก la Say's Law. However, Smith also claimed that the division of labor is limited by the 'extent' of the market. This is
often interpreted as population size, which is not quite accurate. Durkheim instead argued population density is required to facilitate specialization: the extent of the market is better understood as people's ability to interact with each other by buying, selling, contracting,
etc. This is why we generally see cities as engines of growth, not rural areas. A part of what made Industrialization so impactful was people leaving their (miserable) lives on farms to seek opportunities to make a living in cities: the migration of people itself facilitated
