The Wealth of Nations, Book One

Notes on Book One of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), which is free to read at Project Gutenberg¹.

The pin factory. Smith opens with a workshop where ten people, each doing one small step, make tens of thousands of pins a day, where one person working alone might struggle to make twenty. Everything else in the book leans on this picture: specialisation makes people more productive, and trade is what lets them specialise.

Self-interest, not kindness. The most quoted line is about dinner:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

It is easy to read that as a defence of selfishness. In context it reads more like an observation about how strangers manage to cooperate at all.¹

What I want to remember. The size of the market limits how far specialisation can go. A village cannot support a full-time pin maker; a city can. That idea still explains a lot about why cities, and the internet, make some kinds of work possible.