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The author is mischarachterizing how Adam Smith viewed the division of labour. While he viewed it as a gain in economic efficency, he also viewed it as regretta
by tossedaway334 10y ago
The author is mischarachterizing how Adam Smith viewed the division of labour. While he viewed it as a gain in economic efficency, he also viewed it as regrettable, limiting, and damaging to people, especially when taken to an extreme.
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a
few simple operations, of which the effects are
perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same,
has no occasion to exert his understanding or to
exercise his invention in finding out expedients
for removing difficulties which never occur. He
naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such
exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature
to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not
only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in
any rational conversation, but of conceiving any
generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and
consequently of forming any just judgement
concerning many even of the ordinary duties of
private life... But in every improved and civilized
society this is the state into which the labouring
poor, that is, the great body of the people, must
necessarily fall, unless government takes some
pains to prevent it."
The moral side of Adam Smith's arguements is often entirely ignored in analysis of his philosophy. He strongly condems many aspects of a free market/capatialist economy. Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me.
- devoply 10y ago> Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me. Not in the interest of those who rule. Whatever you know is significantly affected by what people with money and power want you to know. Despite all the rhetoric about freedom of thought, etc. Knowledge is socially engineered all the time.
- rtpg 10y agoAnother point (accentuated by the article) is that Smith and Ford are both considered archetypes of "free market capitalism" They are being used here as symbols of the idea. We are talking about capitalism, not about Smith or Ford. Unfortunately this turns into its own feedback loop. Simple intros to Smith talk about free markets, so people associate the name to the idea.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoSmith espoused free markets as an improvement over the then-dominant Mercantilism. What came of "free markets" after him isn't his fault :)
- rhizome 10y agoHow much is this emphasized when his philosophy is being taught? That is, who is doing the ignoring: those who teach, or those who were taught and now forsake it?
- curiouscats 10y agoIt was taught plenty well at my college, Davidson College http://www.davidson.edu/academics/humanities http://www.davidson.edu/academics/humanities, but I can imagine they did quite a bit better job than most of doing so. Still reading Adam Smith it is very obvious what he believed. Even if your economics professor were to ignore much of what Smith said (hopefully they wouldn't fail to but in that event...) it would be a pretty poor student that didn't pick up on it. His 2nd most well know book after Wealth of Nations is called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
- SixSigma 10y agoI'm not going to find it now, but I was blown away when he says that interest rates on loans should be capped to prevent lenders destroying wealth by making loans to those most likely to default (which would justify high rates of interest).
- rhizome 10y agoSo "it's the forsakers," then.
- RodericDay 10y agoAdam Smith and the founding group of the United States were all philosophically opposed to inheritance, and very in favor of estate taxes, estate taxes being very very compatible with capitalism: http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_... If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth. With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death." The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice." Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic." Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground rent" — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age 21, "as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property." Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a democracy. I've mentioned Herbert Hoover's disdain for the "idle rich" and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large wealth to young men "does not do them any real service and is of great and genuine detriment to the community at large.'' In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of Marxism." I'm not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate.
- fpig 10y agoI wouldn't say this specific problem has anything to do with the free market / capitalism. When my country was socialist, this kind of division of labor was way more extreme, people would literally spend their entire "careers" doing the same job from youth to retirement. The problem with capitalism these days tends to be the opposite. The world is changing fast and the economy doesn't really have a need for people who will only do 1 specific simple task for 40 years, to prosper in the long term it is important to be flexible and adapt and learn new things easily. And a lot of workers dislike this, they would actually prefer the situation described in your quote because it provides economic security even if it's dehumanizing.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoSmith wrote "Wealth Of Nations" only to zoom in on issues of political economy after writing the much broader "Theory of Moral Sentiments".