Perri Greenbaum SOCY203 First Response Paper Tuesday February 9, 2016 During the Scottish enlightenment era, the well-known philosopher Adam Smith sought to explore human nature while depicting the current political economy. While he contrasts John Jacques Rousseau, he believes that humans are instructed to be moral citizens that require aid from those around them. He studies the origin of human morality through the exploration of labor markets. Smith starts this explanation through the definition of the division of labor. He defines this term (division of labor) as the orchestrated splitting of work within a job joined by the goal of creating more products in a shorter time period. This formal separation of jobs and services among people for this higher …show more content…
One of the largest highlights of the first few chapters of Smith’s book was that he credited the enhancement of modern industry to the division of labor. Individualized and specialized tasks have been notorious for showing higher productivity levels for many reasons. One reason is that when workers focus on individualized tasks and are assigned to one small part of a larger project they tend to eventually become experts at this task. A second reason for why specialization of individualized tasks is prolific is due to the fact that there is no delay or stall in work time and no work time is wasted on task switching or learning new tasks. The third pro for this approach to individualized tasks was that if a worker is working on one task for such a long time, they pick up on ways to make that task even more lucrative. In Smith’s second chapter, he touches on how the division of labor sprouted due to trading that started way before the enlightenment age. He observes that humans are dependent on the services they trade with each other. Between vain comforts and personalized abilities, humans need one another’s specialized services for survival. Smith provides the example