More Comment on Daily Kos Quotes

Part 2: ‘wipeltz’ writes in Daily Kos, (‘the state of the nation’) 22 October, HERE:

"Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase."

Comment
This is part of Adam Smith’s explanations for the long-term and general effects of the division of labour, which went a long way beyond the famous pin factory example showing the increase in productivity from the way process work may be separated among several labourers.

The substantive point of Adam Smith’s focus on the division of labour was both historical – it raised the living standards of the meanest paid labourer well above the living standards of the hunter-gatherer and also began the long road to extending the life spans once the ‘Mathusian trap’ was breached from the 18th century onwards.

Totally independent hunter-gatherers could meet their basic needs in a few hours work per day, but while the ‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange' remained relatively undeveloped – they had little surplus output to exchange among their small bands – nobody produced a surplus of items that they could exchange, except only occasionally, for the small surplus output of others, until the leap from personal independence to dependence took place. With shepherding, farming, and commerce, that leap was accomplished.

For their incomes from specialized work, labourers earn the means to exchange multiple selected items produced by others. Yanomamö tribes on the Amazon have access to scores of items; New Yorker tribes on the Hudson have access to billions them. How many they can access at any one time depends on their relative incomes, which is Smith’s point. The rich can acquire more.

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." [Moral Sentiments, I.iii.3.1: p 61]

Comment
This comes from the opening chapters of Moral Sentiments, 'Of Propriety', and they are well worth reading.

Nowadays, the mob worships celebrity, some of whom have dubious merits for which they are celebrated. In Smith’s day they were ‘rich and famous’ and were found in monarchies and governments all over Europe and, er, the British colonies.

Smith has much to say about them and about the mob who worshipped them or gained vicarious pleasure from learning of their extravagant foibles, triumphs and tragedies. Where would literature be without the classic tales of the phenomena of the rich and powerful (and before anybody gets smug, cast your mind back to the Camelot Kennedy family – no relation)?

Here is another paragraph along the same lines:

“Of such mighty importance does it appear to be, in the imaginations of men, to stand in that situation which sets them most in the view of general sympathy and attention. And thus, place, that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world.” [TMS I.iii.2.7: p 57)

How true! How relevant! Read Adam Smith for yourself; don’t rely on a few quotes, especially those tossed about to stiffen somebody’s otherwise weak and partial arguments.