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Adam Smith, writing in the 1770s, was the first person to see the importance of the division of labor and to explain part of itsadvantages. He gives as an example the process by which pins were made in England. One man draws out the wire, another strengthens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top to prepare it to receive the head. To put it on is a separate operation, to polish the pins is another. It is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper. And the important business of making pins is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some factories are all performed by different people, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. Ten men, Smith said, in this way, turned out twelve pounds of pins a day or about 4800 pins apiece. But if all of them had worked separately and independently without division of labor, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty pins in a day and perhaps not even one. There can be no doubt that division of labor, provided that it is not taken too far, is an efficient way of organizing work. Fewer people can make more pins. Adam Smith saw this but he also took it for granted that division of labor is in itself responsible for economic growth and development and that it accounts for the difference between expanding economies and those that stand still. But division of labor adds nothing new; it only enables people to produce more of what they already have. | 
