Words    Words    Words

Um, so it looks like I won’t be getting back to work on Adam Smith right away; I appear to have left the book in Missoula, so I’ll have to wait until either I get the hotel to send it to me, or I buy another copy.  Ooops.

[Read more →]

MisCon, in Missoula, Montana, was excellent.  About five hundred people (a good size, in my opinion), and many of them very much worth talking with.  I had a great time on panels, did a tiny bit of music.  I won’t mention the various Cool People I got to hang out with, because I’ll forget someone [...]

[Read more →]

I’m heading for Missoula, Montana.  See you next week if they let me out.

[Read more →]

The discoveries of Newton were significant advances for his time.  Anyone today using Newton’s laws must be careful to consider where they may be applied, and where further developments of science have negated them.  When the science under consideration is political economy, then the state of the society in which the author wrote is a [...]

[Read more →]

In a given neighborhood, labor and stock tend toward equalibrium.  Page 138: “The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labor and stock must, in the same neighborhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality.”
He then discusses what he considers to be the five things that made up for [...]

[Read more →]

Page 122: “The increase of stock, which raises wages, tends to lower profit.”  He explains this as due to competition, which makes sense.
Page 123: “It may be laid down as a maxim, that wherever a great deal can be made by the use of money, a great deal will commonly be given for the use [...]

[Read more →]

Page 91: “The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labor.”  In other words, the “natural” or baseline value of labor is the amount that labor adds to the commodity.  This is why Smith was forced to create profit as an independant part of the value of a commodity, and why he [...]

[Read more →]

Much of this chapter is devoted to supply and demand, and establishing its proper place in setting the price of commodities.  To do this, he creates the concept of “natural price.”  Page 79: “There is in every society or neighborhood an ordinary or average rate both of wages and profit in every different employment of [...]

[Read more →]

Here Smith is analyzing the parts of a commodity.  He begins with “that early and rude state of society” where labor was the only part of a commodity.  Page 67: “It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days or two hours labor should be worth double of what is usually the [...]

[Read more →]

Page 43: “Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.  But after division of labor has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man’s own labor can supply him.  [...]

[Read more →]

Page 33: “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.”  This is worth some time to look at.
1. Leave it to a theoretician of capitalism to see everyone as a merchant.  A theoretician of a feudal monarchical society might just as well have said, “By having control over his home, [...]

[Read more →]

If division of labor is caused and stimulated by the power of exchanging, then the size of the market must limit the degree to which labor can be divided.  In a small market, specialization will not develop–one thinks of the American frontier where each homestead had to be, in some measure, self-sufficient.  The limiting of [...]

[Read more →]

Here I run into a problem, right out of the gate.  On page 22, we are told that the division of labor “is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature…the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”
The claim is that the propensity to trade [...]

[Read more →]

Smith attributes a great deal of the increase in the productivity of labor to division of labor, and presents a good case for it.; at least, I’m convinced.   His comments on agriculture are intriguing.  P12: “The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labor, nor of so complete a separation [...]

[Read more →]