During the initial phase of industrialisation, Adam Smith argued that a nation’s supply of ‘wants and conveniences’ depended mostly on the ‘skill, dexterity and judgment’ of its workers and the extent to which they were employed. His example was the pin factory in which, through specialisation of work tasks, productivity could be multiplied many thousand fold, so that workers in an industrialised nation could enjoy a hugely enhanced standard of living. Smith argued that the wealthy should pay a greater portion of their income in taxes so the nation could provide education, for example, for the less well-off to compensate for the ‘mental mutilation’ caused by the boring, repetitive nature of their ‘specialised’ work.

So how did we get from that position, identified by the father confessor of industrial capitalism, to where we are today, with the Bob Diamonds, Fred Goodwins and Philip Greens of our world being paid zillions for not very much, the less well-off paying proportionately most in taxes and today’s pin factories run by ‘ruthlessly hard-driving, strictly top-down, command-and-control focused, shareholder-value obsessed, win-at-any-cost business leaders’? One explanation is provided in The Road to Co-operation.
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