An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of NationsSmith, Adam
History
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Smith, Adam
Economics
All the improvements in machinery, however, have by no means been the
inventions of those who had occasion to use the machines. Many
improvements have been made by the ingenuity of the makers of the
machines, when to make them became the business of a peculiar trade; and
some by that of those who are called philosophers, or men of speculation,
whose trade it is not to do any thing, but to observe every thing, and
who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers
of the most distant and dissimilar objects in the progress of society,
philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment, the
principal or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens.
Like every other employment, too, it is subdivided into a great number of
different branches, each of which affords occupation to a peculiar tribe
or class of philosophers; and this subdivision of employment in
philosophy, as well as in every other business, improves dexterity, and
saves time. Each individual becomes more expert in his own peculiar
branch, more work is done upon the whole, and the quantity of science is
considerably increased by it.
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different
arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a
well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the
lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own
work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every
other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to
exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity or, what
comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He
supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they
accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general
plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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