What’s less well known about The Wealth of Nations is that Smith also describes the ill effects of monotonous, highly divided labor on the day-to-day experience of workers: The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of
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