Today at Econlib, we are joining our friends at Liberty Matters to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in a six-part weekly essay series.
In the first of these, Eric Schliesser writes about the implications of Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labor. From the article:
The first volume of The Wealth of Nations is long. Smith summarizes this twice in nearly identical fashion, first in his “General Introduction” and then in the title of Volume 1: “Of the causes of the increase in the productive power of labor, and of the order in which its products are naturally distributed among the different classes of people.” This overview includes an implicit contrast between “artificial” or social means of increasing the productivity of the labor force and “natural” means of distributing what this labor produces to the rest of the population. Translating a summary of Smith’s work into modern English, we can say that, according to Smith, the first book of The Wealth of Nations is about the social causes of how the productivity of workers is increased and how the products of workers are distributed to the rest of the population when that distribution is unhindered by government. The two main themes of Volume 1 are therefore the so-called “productivity” and “distribution.”
Please feel free to view the full article here.
