#4 - Wealth of Nations

It would be impossible to talk about the Scottish Enlightenment movement without talking about the Wealth of Nations treatise written by Adam Smith which some credit as the work that invented capitalism.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say he invented capitalism he did come up with some great ideas.

He believed that in order for a functioning society all citizens must be properly educated. If the lower class fails to get proper education a bitterness will ensue and it will create a divide.

Additionally Smith spoke about how the only way we can be a successful economy is to divide the labor. If one person is too busy harvesting every single material and doing every process involved of making something, there will be far fewer products than if we separate the processes and become specialists.

Perhaps the most important idea Smith has is that after we divide the labor, we must make sure that people don’t get bogged down with a futile task that becomes too redundant. He uses the example of a man making nails. If he makes thousands of nails and is never challenged by his work and never has intellectual curiosity he risks going insane from boredom. Smith advocated we avoid this at all costs.

This is where I was inspired to make my utopia’s “social problem”. I want to solve the problem of people hating their jobs.