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
The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their
children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends
to widen and extend those limits. It deserves to be remarked, too, that it
necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the proportion which the
demand for labour requires. If this demand is continually increasing, the
reward of labour must necessarily encourage in such a manner the marriage
and multiplication of labourers, as may enable them to supply that
continually increasing demand by a continually increasing population. If
the reward should at any time be less than what was requisite for this
purpose, the deficiency of hands would soon raise it; and if it should at
any time be more, their excessive multiplication would soon lower it to
this necessary rate. The market would be so much understocked with labour
in the one case, and so much overstocked in the other, as would soon force
back its price to that proper rate which the circumstances of the society
required. It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any
other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it
when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast. It is
this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all
the different countries of the world; in North America, in Europe, and in
China; which renders it rapidly progressive in the first, slow and gradual
in the second, and altogether stationary in the last.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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