Mar 28– From Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776)

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Day 28– From Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776)

Summary:

Commentary: I flooded my bathroom and kitchen and got like 3 hours of sleep last night, so I'm going to shortchange you all here. Short commentary that I've said before: I wish we'd read more excerpts from these kind of primary semi-foundational documents when I was in school. We definitely read 10 variants of the phrase, "The Wealth of Nations was one of the most influential economic texts of all time!" but other than "It's capitalism" and "The invisible hand" I don't think I could've told you a thing about it when I was 18 or 20. If you're going to put in a textbook, lesson, test, whatever that a book is super important, shouldn't a student of that course be able to tell you more than a sentence that isn't really an accurate summary?

It's a good thing titles/subtitles aren't a finite resource. The full title of tonight's section would be:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations- Book I- Of The Causes Of Improvement In The Productive Powers Of Labour, And Of The Order According To Which Its Produce Is Naturally Distributed Among The Different Ranks Of The People. Chapter I- Of The Division Of Labour.

That's a short paragraph on its own.

The division of labor is interesting. It's obviously true that one person getting good at one thing and just focusing on that is helpful. But there is also such a thing as over specialization. The same is true in work, academics, hobbies... Even in tools/machines. Today, I had to buy a prybar to pull down some molding. There was a molding specific one, and it probably works really well. But how often am I going to need to pull down molding? This thing was basically a hand sized hoe, it wouldn't have been any good for any other wedging/prying. On the other hand, I have a Leatherman that sits in my toolbox, and it does about a million things pretty well. But have you ever tried to cut something with the saw on one of those, compared to a regular hand saw? Anything more than an inch or so around is a struggle, and it's almost impossible to get a straight cut. Doesn't fit well in most miter boxes or other guides either.