I often say that you can be miserable before eating a cookie and you can be miserable after eating a cookie, but you can never be miserable while you’re eating a cookie.
— from the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com, “Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook” by Ina Garten
I’ve heard a few people talking about the Economy lately.
Okay, yes, you’re right. Everybody has been talking about the Economy lately. And acting pretty miserable.
Half of them have been cursing and spitting… absolutely furious that “the Economy” has taken a back seat to public health for the past few months.
The other half has been cursing and spitting as well, but out of the opposite side of their mouth… absolutely furious that public health — and justice, and equality, and education, and who knows what else — has been taking a back seat to “the Economy” for the past 50 years or so.
Me? I’m standing in the middle of all this cursing and spitting, pointing the finger of Righteousness at the person who caused all the trouble in the first place.
Adam Smith. The man who ruined my life.
How people could take such a man seriously, who went around in public with his hair in curlers, I will never know. But seriously, they have indeed taken him.
The problem started with his once-famous book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, more often referred to as simply The Wealth of Nations, published in England in 1776. If the book had just remained “once-famous”, I might be a happier man today, but his book is still selling well on Amazon and in bookstores. Not that anyone actually reads the book; who reads a 700-page book on economics, nowadays? But that doesn’t prevent economists, of all stripes, from quoting this or that passage, if it happens to bolster their intellectual arguments… prefacing each statement with, “According to Adam Smith, the man who invented economics…”
Why am I not impressed?
Here’s a short excerpt from Wealth of Nations:
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty.
Yes, I am very willing to admit, that even with my utmost industry, I would struggle — left to my own devices — to manufacture one straight pin per day. I certainly could not make twenty straight pins. (Safety pins? We won’t even go there.)
My mother, bless her little heart, was an amateur seamstress, and amassed quite a collection of pins, which she kept in various pin cushions. She utilized them freely when altering blouses and shirts and pants and jackets for members of my family. If Mom had depended upon my father to manufacture her pins for her, she would have been one sorrowful seamstress. Dad was a great guy, but I doubt he could manufacture one pin per week. And they probably wouldn’t even work right.
Adam Smith, meanwhile, believed that the “division of labour” — kind of a new idea in 1776 — would help bring prosperity to the entire world, if practiced widely. He wrote, about making pins:
One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands…
I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed… they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.
The real problem here, which neither Adam Smith nor the modern economists want us to think about, is that a pin used to be a pretty special item. When a seamstress knew that it took a talented worker a whole day to make one pin, think how she must have felt when she had a dozen or more of them, stuck into her little pin cushion?
But thanks to Adam Smith and his fellow economists, pins are now a dime a dozen.
Then Apple announces plans to manufacture 80 million iPhones next year. Does Adam Smith have any idea how hard it would be for a “workman” like me to make an iPhone — left to my own devices? But they’re now being turned out faster than pins.
And what appears on these millions of iPhones, on a daily basis?
Facebook.
Makes no difference if the Economy is in the toilet, and people are dropping like flies from a contagious virus.
Facebook.
This is the world the economists have created.
I guess I need a cookie.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.