19: The Specialization of Labor
One of the most important practices in developed economies is the specialization of labor amongst the persons who do the work. This subject has been discussed at length by those who find it a wonder of the present age, but the present specialization of labor is merely an evolution on a practice that has been going on for centuries.
Even in relatively primitive societies, there is specialization of labor: in a savage tribe there emerge specialists - a few members who are skilled at making spears or building huts engage in this activity almost exclusively and, through an informal arrangement, are provided of food by those for whom they provide these goods. In a fishing village, there are boat-builders and net-weavers who provide for the needs of those who participate in the actual activity of fishing.
Only in sparsely populated areas do human beings remain specialists. A country farm in a remote area must provide itself of everything it needs: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. But in a populated county, people specialize: some grow vegetables while others grow wheat, some weave cloth, some provide timber, some herd animals. There are ample reports in literature of thousands of years ago of shepherds - who had specialized in raising sheep or goats and traded their goods with others.
It is therefore merely an evolution and refinement of this practice that we see in the modern age, in which workers in the same factory perform different parts of a task to complete a single finished product.
Benefits of the Division of Labor
Babbage then lists and describes in brief detail some of the various advantages of specialization he feels have not been sufficiently recognized by other economists:
- Learning and Training. The time required to learn a skill and develop it to mastery is considerable, such that workers who specialize in a specific profession can develop the skill to produce more effectively. The smaller the task, the quicker it can be learned and mastered.
- Reduction of Waste. Those who do many things do them quite inefficiently, creating an inordinate amount of waste from botched work and inefficient use of materials, increasing the cost of their product.
- Reduced Exertion. An individual who learns to do a task well comes to perform it fluidly, without the level of exhaustion and injuries that occur when someone struggles with a task they do not know very well.
- Excellence and Rapidity. In the same sense, the repetition of a single task gives the worker the ability to improve both in effectiveness and efficiency - making a better product faster.
- Efficient Use of Tools. An individual who must do several tasks must obtain or be furnished with the tools to do them all, and many will lay idle as he attends to a specific part of a task to the exclusion of all others. Also, tools can be specialized to be efficient at a particular task.
- Efficient Use of Tools. When individuals perform repetitive tasks, the opportunity to leverage or devise tools to assist with specialized tasks. If a blacksmith makes but a dozen horseshoes a month, his general-purpose anvil will do, but if he creates hundreds per day he will doubtless contrive a way to modify his anvil to make the task more efficient.
Automation of Specialized Tasks
When work is subdivided to the point that tasks become exceedingly simple - such as bending a piece of iron at a specific angle - it then becomes apparent that machinery is better capable of performing them than men. A machine can perform a very simple task at greater speed and with greater accuracy than a human worker.
He obliquely observes that it maybe possible to completely automate most production facilities if demand for their products is sufficient to justify the cost of machinery. The skills demanded of workers will be less in the manner of performing tasks as in devising machines to perform tasks, then operating and maintaining the equipment. Knowledge of the processes is necessary (one cannot devise a machine to make a horseshoe without understanding how horseshoes are made) but the value of hands-on tasks becomes diminished.
The value to the worker is in the transformation of work from a physical process to a mental one - instead of applying his muscles in the manner of an animal, he may exercise his mind in a manner that is distinctly human. And the value to society of automation is the abundance of cheap and well-made goods.
Example: Pin Makiong
Babbage returns to Adam Smith's example of pin-making: the manner in which the tasks of drawing a wire, sharpening the tip, and flattening the head are divided among separate workers, who each perform the same motions with specialization tools and need learn only their part of the work. Smith spoke of this in theory, and Babbage contributes a description of pin-making in practice.
His description, in tedious detail, describes how the task has been made into one of six steps (draw the wire, straighten it, develop the point, twist and cut the head, flatten the head, and treating it to prevent rust) as well as the task of packaging the pins for sale.
(EN: It's very tedious, and provides excessive support for the argument. The pin factories of his time turned out thousands of pins per day, compared to the twenty or so that a blacksmith could make.)