Money & WorkFact

Ten workers, 48,000 pins – alone they managed barely twenty.

In 1776 Adam Smith described a pin factory: the process was split into about 18 distinct operations, and ten people together made upwards of 48,000 pins a day. Working separately, without specialisation, each could hardly have made twenty, perhaps not even one.

Useful: Specialisation explains productivity better than effort does – and shows why the division of labour needs markets.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Arbeit Geschichte Produktivitaet

Difficulty:

Related cards

Countries with short working weeks are often the most productive.Labour productivity is economic output per hour worked, not per person. Grinding through long hours …
How to spend hours a day actually thinking instead of reacting.Cal Newport calls focused, distraction-free work on hard tasks deep work. His recipe: block fixed …
How a rumour can kill a healthy bank.Because banks hold only a fraction of deposits as cash, a bank can become insolvent when many …
A 3% raise can be a pay cut.The nominal wage is the number on your payslip; the real wage is what it buys. If you get a 3% …
Convert prices into hours of your life, not euros.This mental tool comes from the bestseller 'Your Money or Your Life': divide your net income by all …
How you really learn at work: almost never in a seminar.The 70-20-10 model comes from a survey of nearly 200 executives at the Center for Creative …
One hour of work a week and you aren't unemployed.Under the International Labour Organization definition, which Eurostat also uses, anyone who worked …
Why the world counts in dollars: a hotel in New Hampshire, 1944.In July 1944, 44 nations at Bretton Woods agreed on a monetary system: the dollar was pegged to …

Keep reading

This card belongs to the topic Money & Work. Every card is short, cites a source and can be saved – due ones come back by themselves later.

About Doomlearn · Projects · Legal notice · Privacy · Terms