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
In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply
the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of
the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to
collect them all into the same workhouse. We can seldom see more, at one
time, than those employed in one single branch. Though in such
manufactures, therefore, the work may really be divided into a much
greater number of parts, than in those of a more trifling nature, the
division is not near so obvious, and has accordingly been much less
observed.
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one
in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the
trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the
division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the
use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same
division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps,
with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not
make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not
only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number
of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One
man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth
points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make
the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a
peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by
itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a
pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations,
which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though
in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have
seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed,
and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct
operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but
indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when
they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a
day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling
size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of
forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth
part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four
thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought
separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated
to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made
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