Today at Econlib, we’re joining our friends at Liberty Matters in their celebration of the 250th anniversary of the publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations through a series of six weekly essays.
In the first of these, Eric Schliesser writes about implications of Adam Smith‘s theory of the division of labor. From the article:
Book 1 of Wealth of Nations is a lengthy affair. Smith summarizes it twice almost identically, first in the “general introduction” and then in the title of Book 1 as follows: “Of the Causes of Improvement in the productive Powers of Labour, and of the Order according to which its Produce is naturally distributed among the different Ranks of the People.” This summary contains an implied contrast between the ‘artificial’ or social means of improving the productivity of the workforce, and the “natural” means of the distribution among the rest of the population of what this workforce produces. If we paraphrase Smith’s summary of his work into modern English, we can say that according to Smith the first book of Wealth of Nations is about the social causes of how workers are made to be more productive, and how what they produce is distributed among the rest of the population if that distribution is left undisturbed by government. So, the main two subjects of Book 1 are what we may call ‘productivity’ and ‘distribution.’
We hope you’ll check out the whole article, which you can find here.
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