Adam Smith famously used a pin factory to illustrate the advantages of specialization, choosing this “very trifling manufacture” because the different tasks were performed under one roof: “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, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”
By improving workers’ skills and encouraging purpose-built machinery, the division of labor leads to miraculous productivity gains. Even a small and ill-equipped manufacturer, Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, could boost each worker’s output from a handful of pins a day to nearly 5,000.
So what happened to all those pins? Virginia Postrel explains in the May issue of Reason magazine.
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