Why Do We Need Each Other? Economics' Final Question

In Book I, Chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations , published in 1776, Adam Smith described a pin factory. An untrained worker making pins alone might not make even one pin a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But once ten workers divided the labor among themselves, they could produce more than 48,000 pins a day. Even if we use 48,000 as the figure, each worker produced at least 240 times what…