Adam Smith › A game
The Nailers’ Street
What makes a nation rich? Not gold, Smith decided, but the flow of useful things its people make. Run a street in Fife and find out how he got there, and what he warned about next.
Smith grew up in Kirkcaldy, a short walk from the nail-makers. In the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations he gives three of them. A common smith who has never made nails can make two or three hundred a day, and those, too, very bad ones. A smith who has made nails, but not as his only business, makes eight hundred or a thousand. And boys who had never done any other trade could each make upwards of two thousand three hundred. Nothing about the boy is better except practice.
Your street has five people and five trades. Click each person to give them one trade, or leave them doing a bit of everything. Then run five years.
The street’s yearly output
The dashed red line is what the street makes when everybody does a bit of everything.
The boy can make nails and nothing else only if somebody will buy two thousand three hundred nails a day. Smith made that a law in his third chapter: the division of labour must always be limited by the extent of the market.
Set up a nailer making a thousand a day, three hundred days a year. Where should he live? Try at least two.
it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself
— The Wealth of Nations, Book One, chapter three
Kirkcaldy had a nail trade at one end of the street and the Forth at the other. So a nation is rich by the flow of useful things its people make, and the flow grows as people take narrower jobs, as far as the market lets them. It has almost nothing to do with gold, or colonies, or the balance of trade.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Trade is good on the coast. The nail-masters of the town have met, and they bring you a proposal: a law that no nails may come into the county from anywhere else. It will protect an honest trade, they say, and keep good men in work. You sit in the legislature. What do you do?
And the boy at the forge
The book that opens by celebrating the division of labour settles the account in Book Five. A man whose whole life is spent on a few simple operations, Smith wrote, generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become, and this is what will happen to the great body of the people unless government takes some pains to prevent it. His remedy was public education.
One book holds both the pin factory and the case against what it does to the man at the eighteenth operation. Nobody quoting the first is obliged to quote the second.
The nailers’ figures, the Highland nailer and the quotations are Smith’s, as the book gives them. The other trades’ numbers, the market town and the effects of the law are an illustration, not history.
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