In 1776, Adam Smith famously described the “very trifling manufacture” of a pin factory. By dividing the production of a single pin into eighteen distinct operations—one worker drawing the wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it—a small team could produce thousands of units daily. Smith noted that a lone, unspecialised worker could scarcely make…
Category: Social division of labour
Understanding Economic Viability in Structured Production Systems
The Core Insight: Two Types of Goods, Two Ways of Trading At the heart of our research lies a deceptively simple but profound observation about modern economies: not all goods are traded the same way. When you buy coffee at a café, you participate in a competitive market—the price reflects supply and demand from countless…
Commodities: II―A property-based approach to economic goods
In the first instalment of this set of posts on the conception of economic commodities, I discussed the standard economic market approach to commodities: Commodities are determined fully by their market properties. This is rather limiting view of the important concept of economic commodities. It seems more logical and productive to have a property-based conception…
Two volume book on the social division of labour is now published
Both volumes are now published with Palgrave-Macmillan.