I’m in a really interesting philosophy class this semester that’s reading important economic texts from history with an eye towards the claims about human nature and human value that underlie them. The first section of the course- focusing on Adam Smith- is now complete so I thought I’d share some thoughts on it.
Unlike some such philosophical texts as, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations bears a title that provides a matter-of-fact, able and accurate synopsis of the text that will follow. As it suggests, Smith explores many questions of wealth on a societal scale, examining the categories that wealth might properly be classified under, the conditions that cause wealth to grow, and what it takes for workers to see their conditions improve in a capital system. To these ends, Smith provides a historical outline of the emergence and growth of market economies in the early modern period coupled with analysis of the meaning and measure of value and consistent policy advocacy focused on removing impediments to growth. At the same time, Smith is also interested in the market’s impact on the human person who spends his days within the world it shapes. Read through this emphasis, I think Smith’s work provides a clear study of the impacts our economic arrangements have on the development of our personal and societal characters, for good and ill.
Smith insistently focuses throughout on economic growth rather than on the mere maintenance of static wealth, arguing that “it is in the progressive [growth] state … that the condition of the laboring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable” (91). This is because only the relative scarcity of workers in a growing productive environment overcomes natural cartel conditions and induces employers to offer competitive wages. As both a matter of history and a recommendation of policy, he describes systems of divided labor as key to improving and expanding the production of goods, which drives growth and in turn increases demand for labor, bringing wages up (and the cost of many useful or essential goods down). Such organization of society into a structure that allows specialization both of individuals into specific industries and of individuals within specific industries into specific roles originates, according to Smith, in the natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” (17). Though people in some pre-social state would be capable of personally providing most or all of the basic needs for their survival, this human impulse to trade encourages dividing labor; divided labor allows specialization, saving time, improving the skill of workers in their specific craft, and encouraging invention.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of divided labor in the history of modern society and the modern self. Smith understands that divided labor economies ultimately make us into a fundamentally different kind of people than we would be in a more primitive state, less self-reliant, more opulent, and more mutually enriched by living in community. And Smith goes on to suggest that this state is not just different but is actually, for the great majority of workers, often worse. The same production system that materially improves human outcomes in aggregate tends in his estimation to make most working people less capable of "bearing a part in any rational conversation … conceiving of any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life" (vol 2, 303). While a certain class—the managers, inventors, monied movers and shakers—always attain positions that require the same mental dexterity, flexibility, and inventiveness that primitive life required of everyone, most workers cultivate only a very narrow range of necessary skills in repetitive settings that do nothing to stir creativity or inspire intelligent participation in public affairs. And even the thinkers are themselves a class of divided labor, a “particular class of citizens” for whom “philosophy, or speculation, becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole trade” (14).
The greatest polymath intellectual of Smith’s time is not so great a generalist as primitive man, nor perhaps is any figure so benighted in otherwise prosperous times as the single-skilled industrial worker whose imploded mental architecture Smith describes. Recognizing this reality leads Smith, while steadfastly opposing any interference that tampers with the allocative power of the invisible hand, to nonetheless support the dedication of some public expense to providing at least a modicum of a universal education to the working poor. While opposing more direct welfare intervention on the grounds that “law can never regulate [wages] properly” (87) and that providing services for free can remove an important quality motive (his reasoning for insisting that schools charge a small tuition even from parents of the poor), it is remarkable that Smith steps so far outside the simplistic laissez-faire stereotype on this issue. That he does so suggests a common thread across many of his observations and recommendations: unlike many who followed in his footsteps and exploited the capital system he helped cement, Smith’s concern for the poor is neither mendacity nor pretension, but earnestly at the root of all his work, and he recognizes the harm as well as the good that comes to the human self in a capital system.
While we grapple in the present day with the challenges and absurdities of what some, with touching optimism, have come to call ‘late capitalism,’ it can surely be instructive to remember the promise of the market in Adam Smith’s time, a promise that has been met time and again as greater and greater parts of the world population have been lifted from destitution to achieve standards of living that were unimaginable for most of human history. While some important realities have shifted and brought home the point that continuous growth is truly not sustainable on this planet (some suggest we find others, and so we may), the achievement of market capitalism in the last three centuries is nothing to be sneered at or unthinkingly dismissed. And how could it be dismissed? We are now the people that the market made us, hardly any of us sufficient to live outside its protection. Accepting that fact may require a painful realism for some, but an honest assessment of our present situation must begin nowhere else.
Good summary. Now, expand your thoughts. What would you consider for next steps? What would you propose? How can a society as a whole try to balance the pros and cons? Sounds like the repetitive nature of necessary work needs to be countered by some form of intellectual stimulation. This reminds me of something I heard a long time ago...that in Cuban cigar factories, one employee would just sit and read aloud to the cigar rollers, newspapers, works of literature, whatever. This was done to counter the impact of a simple repetitive task on the workers, just sitting and rolling for the entire work day. Supposedly, this inspired the names of some cigars.