Ten workers splitting a pin into 18 steps made far more pins than one worker alone

Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with a pin factory: one untrained worker might struggle to make even one pin a day, but ten workers each specializing in a single step of the process could turn out upwards of 48,000 pins between them. Smith used it to argue that dividing labor into narrow, repeated tasks is the real engine of productivity.

— Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Book I, Chapter 1, 1776
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