Nobody writing today would write in that style. Modern writing advice is always "reduce passive sentences to as near zero as possible" and to keep sentences and vocabulary simple enough to keep the Flesch-Kincaid level down many notches lower than Adam Smith's.
Supposedly most nonfiction and political writing today comes in Flesch-Kincaid 7 to 11. That is, at levels suitable to what students in the US school system in 8th to 11th grade (age 14 to 17) are expected to be able to handle.
Has anyone calculated Steve Sailer's Flesch-Kincaid level in his columns?
Donald Trump --- (or, "Israel's orange buffoon," as I now want to call him; who revealed himself a crazed, blundering war maniac after all, and follows orders like a dog--or he would be one, if dogs could be narcissistic buffoons with personality cults) --- in his speaking, Trump gets a notoriously low Flesch-Kincaid score.
Those who have studied it have consistently found DJT tends to speak in the 4th-to-5th grade range, far lower than most previous presidents. He seldom ever speaks at above 6th-grade level. In practice, this means everyone, down to the far reaches of the left side of the bell curve, and even ESL-people, can understand everything pretty easily, especially if they're a bit familiar with the buffoon's whole reality-tv drama-theatrics.
On DJT's extreme rhetorical simplicity, some of his defenders have said over the past decade: Hey, this is a key to popularity. And unfortunately it's a key to the man's unfortunate personality cult. He recruits people from the left-side of the bell curve who'd otherwise generally be non-political, and hypes them up like pro-wrestling fans. The success of this strategy is a classic case of the problem of demagogues in democracy. We got the orange buffoon thrust on us again. And the buffoon gave us endless Wars for Israel --- pitched, sold, and justified at a 4th-grade level.
BTW: Trump himself would probably simply not understand a text like "The Wealth of Nations." But we'll never know. Because he's too lazy to try.
I have not found anyone discussing it in scholarly works.
Recall that Flesch had been a consultant for educational and instructional manuals for US Government agencies, military manuals, and businesses. (In addition to writing, "Why Johnny Can't Read.") His focus was on general reading difficulty for adults, and he calibrated his measures using 20th‑century functional prose.
Flesch-Kincaid was based on the work of Flesch, but the metric was designed by J. Peter Kincaid and his team for U.S. Navy training materials. Consequently, it is something of a mismatch with the work of Adam Smith or Edward Gibbon, because their writing dates from an era of exceptionally high standards. Their sentences are longer. They used lots of Latin-derived words. Anyone writing then whose work is still read today would have expected their readers to be way above average. Logical scaffolding was employed extensively, and they certainly would have assumed their readers knew rhetoric.
An analogy would be the mass-produced furniture we can purchase compared to Thomas Chippendale's custom-made products.
Probably what you need is a metric that better compares first-rate prose over time. Mean Dependency Distance is the best one I have read about. Unfortunately, there are no free online MDD calculators. You have to use a research tool to calculate it.
My impression is that the French developed their lucid "classical" prose style over the course of the 17th Century, but the English lagged, putting more effort into poetry.
Indeed, Gibbon actually published his first work in French, whose contemporary writing style he subsequently carried into English.
The _Decline_ probably contains (and sustains) the best English prose ever written, but the late 18th c. has lots of impressive examples (Burke, Samuel Johnson, even perhaps the Federalist Papers, etc.). It's also pretty remarkable how many of these guys hung out together in the evenings.
I agree that there is a debate to be had on how useful Flesch-Kincaid is or isn't for whatever purpose. It WOULD seem to be an item of Sailerian interest simply because it's quantifiable. I don't ever recall Steve writing about it but I;m sure he must have at some point.
(Related, maybe: a wise person once said: "Once a measure becomes a target, it's no longer a good measure.")
The advice to reduce one's use of the passive voice is good. A lot of writers overuse it and (IMO) it comes across as wishy-washy and gives the impression the writer is trying to lessen the appearance of responsibility on the part of the person doing the action.
Most writers could really use an editor. Most writers should remember that the first sentence of each paragraph should be a topic sentence. Most writers should remember shorter paragraphs are better. When seeing a paragraph that takes an entire page, one can easily identify multiple thought that should have been in separate paragraphs.
Keep your head in your bum and you'll miss the most consequential presidency since Reagan, if not FDR (hopefully, without the world war and aggravated depression).
Except for the total lack of passing legislation. If Trump has any long lasting impact, it will be that Congress becomes obsolete and the U.S. becomes more like Hungary with a strong man government and no checks.
Same as his first term. Had the house and senate for two years and didn’t do a damn thing. He’ll lose congress in the midterms and then bitch about how he can’t get anything done. Unless the Israelis want it done, of course.
Giving Israel complete and total control of all US foreign policy is consequential, but not in a good way.
The dumbing down of everything, the Third World-like arbitrariness, the pretending to be putting effort into deportations: to me none of these are great signs. Trump-II is the most imperial of presidencies, but it seems to be an imperialism in the name of stupidity, narcissism, and new, shiny, louder version of boob-bait-for-the-bubbas.
What the Trump experience teaches us is that character really does matter.
The modern "State of the Union speech" is a set-piece speech, written carefully by others and read (performed) by the president like an actor would do.
The data I referred to are based on a wider range of speeches, aggregating dozens of ordinary addresses.
To find these, Google around for something like "presidents flesch-kincaid trump."
Presidents' U.S.-school grade-level equivalents for their public speaking:
.
[11th grade]
- Hoover
- Carter
.
[10th grade]
- Obama
- (average Congressional speech grade-level, 1970s-1980s, at the 10th-grade level).
.
[9th grade]
- Eisenhower
- Kennedy
- Nixon
- Ford
- Clinton
- (average Congressional speech grade-level, 1950s-1960s & 1990s-2000s, at the 9th-grade level).
.
[8th grade]
- Lyndon Johnson
- Reagan
- (average Congressional speech grade-level, 1870s thru 1940s, consistently at the 8th-grade level).
.
[7th grade]
- Franklin Roosevelt
- George H W Bush
- George W Bush
.
[6th grade]
- Truman
.
[5th grade]
- Trump (first term)
.
By the last few year of the 2010s, Democrats' grade-level in their speeches had risen to a firmer, higher-end 9th-grade level; and Republicans' grade-level had fallen to the 8th-grade level. After about 2018 there was a full 1.0 grade-level split between R and D. This had never happened before back to the start of the study (1870s). (See: Steve Sailer's "Trump dumbed down the Republican Party.")
You, E.H. Hail, made a claim. The data above contradict your claim. You responded with 'Google around for something like "presidents flesch-kincaid trump"', as if it were my task to support your claim. Then you pasted a link to some internet scribbler and followed it with unquantified hand-waving.
Either you are unwilling to quantify your claim, or you do not believe you have sufficient data to support your claim.
The whole "I'm so much smarter than Trump and his stupid and ignorant supporters" line gives of a strong whiff of butt-hurt ego issues as bad as Trump's. (But he gets to be president and you don't.)
> Those who have studied it have consistently found DJT tends to speak in the 4th-to-5th grade range, far lower than most previous presidents. <
And yet his 2nd presidency--following the worst presidency in US history--has probably been the best presidency we've had since Eisenhower and Operation Wetback.
The obvious: What matters is about ideas is their truth, not their complexity. (Ex. Ptolemy's epicycles were more complex but heliocentrism while much simpler is much closer to reality.) Even less so the complexity of verbal expression.
Trump saying "Somali pirates" while crude and verbally simplistic, has the bright shining virtue of being fundamentally *true* in outlining the useless and destructive quality of some peoples, the destructions wrought by letting them settle here and the overall parasitic relationship generally between immigrants and heritage Americans. Its truth is valuable. While whole forests of trees have been felled in the name of "diversity" spew--from pre-K to college level in verbal complexity--telling destructive lies.
Likewise, Trump's invite to stand if you believe:
"The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."
is not particularly "complex", but it fundamentally--logically and morally--true, and immensely clarifying, compared to the "complex" verbiage endlessly spewed to try and justify policies which do exactly the reverse--trash the interests of Americans in favor of foreigners.
Truth and clarity are virtues. Verbal complexity is not and if used to hide and justify rash and destructive policies is a tool of evil.
Smith didn't bring up the advantage of keeping all available tools and machines working constantly, but I guess that comes under "sauntering."
My brother reminded me a week ago that our grandfather's small hosiery mill (that he'd bought from bankruptcy) made unfinished socks in the 30s & 40s. Another company knitted the toe end closed. When the transfer became uncompetitive, he closed the mill and sold the equipment, as he was too old and ill to expand, and his only son had fled town to the Navy.
"...the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects in the progress of society, philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment...."
Shouldn't that be a period after "society," or is it grad school English? Funny that Smith moves to his own occupation.
I read that book in graduate school and still have a copy. It's wonderful and does not need to be rewritten by someone pretending to tell us something entirely new.
As Steve remarks in this essay, 1776 was also a big year for history.
> and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. <
Interesting that at the end, Smith--obliquely--hints at the importance of HBD.
Interesting--and deeply sad--that 250 years later--with so much scientific and technical progress and accompanying material prosperity under our belt--our "elite" discourse is has gotten considerably dumber about precisely the most important topics.
Specialization and the division of labor can take many forms. It's really a way of thinking. I've brought it up often during casual conversations with friends and neighbors. It evolved organically with my wife and I. Three kids, unconventional jobs, different natural abilities. Always quoted Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations. People smiled. It came up when I prepared a meal. Sometimes a 'gourmet' meal. Sometimes a failed experiment. Had an unrealistic sense of my own creativity.
As it turned out I was mostly good at it. I planned, shopped, prepared (often served and cleaned up) for a family of five for 25 years. Often failing when most weren't aware. Sometimes a soft 'thankyou'.
As a PhD Psychologist (and post doc Achitecture) she handled all communications with contractors, plumbers, electricians, assorted laborers and anything involving effective communication, technology and connectivity. Actually anything requiring empathy and savoir- faire.
A grad biz guy I was running a SF based Marketing Research company, I would get up early and prepare bag lunches and drawing a fun pictures on the brown bags. Often driving them to school (and leave work to pick up a sick kid). I was closest to the school(s).
This evolved out of the necessity for efficiency. It was never discussed or planned, like 'you do half and I'll do half'. Naturally we just did what we were best at and jumped in when necessity called.
There were numerous other examples. As Chairman of the local school board she handled all educational activities, school selection, teacher meetings. I helped with homework and read children books before bed. She bought and installed all technology, I washed the cars, raked leaves, changed diapers.
Anything that involved intelligence and communication skills were hers, I filled in for the rest.
Point being that 'specialization and the division of labor' goes well beyond pins and basic economics into social psychology, personal relationships, business planning, family decision making, possibly jettisoning conventional gender roles.
It's a basic approach to success well beyond the original, seminal usage.
Interestingly, as I recall Smith was less focused on the importance of the steam engine and of future technological developments in general. I guess it was still too soon to see that the Industrial Revolution was about to happen, a lot of which depended on the development of new metal-working machine tools powered by steam engines. [Somebody correct me if I am wrong about this.]
There was some story like Watt's theoretical design for the advanced steam engine pre-supposed almost perfectly circular giant cylinders made with tolerances that nobody a few years before had ever even attempted, but a factory in England had just developed that capability.
I believe Daniel Boorstin wrote about some of the paradoxes involved in thinking about manufacturing "tolerances," which were alien to the established mindset. To get to higher quality, you had to admit you weren't going to get to perfection. Or something like that. In general, the statistical mindset developed quite late.
Once you got the hand of it, though, you could vastly increase productivity through division of labor, as in Eli Whitney's "American System" for making guns out of standardized parts. You no longer needed a master gunsmith who could kludge together the entire gun, you just needed unskilled workers to stick part A in part B, assuming you could consistently manufacture A and B within your tolerances so that they would fit together X % of the time.
A remarkable feature of the Scottish Enlightenment is the transformation of prose. Before the Union, the Parliament of Scotland legislated in the Scottish form of English, for instance this 1704 measure concerning Dundee, which Cromwell had
"pillag'd and plundered in a most lamentable manner; as also the vast damnages and losses the toun sustained by the beatting doun of its harbour, the necessar reparation whereof was exceeding expensive and burdensome, and moreover the great charges which the toun was at by the marching and countermarching of troups throw the burgh about the time of the revolution..."
Traditional Scots has charm, but The Wealth of Nations is a literary classic.
The Adam Smith excerpt: posted here
- Words: 3477
- Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 14.8 ("15th-grade reading level").
- Passive sentences: 29.4%
Nobody writing today would write in that style. Modern writing advice is always "reduce passive sentences to as near zero as possible" and to keep sentences and vocabulary simple enough to keep the Flesch-Kincaid level down many notches lower than Adam Smith's.
Supposedly most nonfiction and political writing today comes in Flesch-Kincaid 7 to 11. That is, at levels suitable to what students in the US school system in 8th to 11th grade (age 14 to 17) are expected to be able to handle.
Has anyone calculated Steve Sailer's Flesch-Kincaid level in his columns?
Donald Trump --- (or, "Israel's orange buffoon," as I now want to call him; who revealed himself a crazed, blundering war maniac after all, and follows orders like a dog--or he would be one, if dogs could be narcissistic buffoons with personality cults) --- in his speaking, Trump gets a notoriously low Flesch-Kincaid score.
Those who have studied it have consistently found DJT tends to speak in the 4th-to-5th grade range, far lower than most previous presidents. He seldom ever speaks at above 6th-grade level. In practice, this means everyone, down to the far reaches of the left side of the bell curve, and even ESL-people, can understand everything pretty easily, especially if they're a bit familiar with the buffoon's whole reality-tv drama-theatrics.
On DJT's extreme rhetorical simplicity, some of his defenders have said over the past decade: Hey, this is a key to popularity. And unfortunately it's a key to the man's unfortunate personality cult. He recruits people from the left-side of the bell curve who'd otherwise generally be non-political, and hypes them up like pro-wrestling fans. The success of this strategy is a classic case of the problem of demagogues in democracy. We got the orange buffoon thrust on us again. And the buffoon gave us endless Wars for Israel --- pitched, sold, and justified at a 4th-grade level.
BTW: Trump himself would probably simply not understand a text like "The Wealth of Nations." But we'll never know. Because he's too lazy to try.
Considering how many PhD economists don't get the Inquiry, this isn't a slur against Trump.
In a few days, I will post the famous opening of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and I'd appreciate if you do the calculations for Gibbon.
Flesch-Kincaid Score for Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Score Volume
14.6 Author Prefaces
15.8 One
9.6 Two
9.7 Three
17.4 Four
16.9 Five
9.9 Six
That's interesting. Has it been noted before that volume's 2,3, and 6 are notably easier reads than 1, 4, and 5?
I have not found anyone discussing it in scholarly works.
Recall that Flesch had been a consultant for educational and instructional manuals for US Government agencies, military manuals, and businesses. (In addition to writing, "Why Johnny Can't Read.") His focus was on general reading difficulty for adults, and he calibrated his measures using 20th‑century functional prose.
Flesch-Kincaid was based on the work of Flesch, but the metric was designed by J. Peter Kincaid and his team for U.S. Navy training materials. Consequently, it is something of a mismatch with the work of Adam Smith or Edward Gibbon, because their writing dates from an era of exceptionally high standards. Their sentences are longer. They used lots of Latin-derived words. Anyone writing then whose work is still read today would have expected their readers to be way above average. Logical scaffolding was employed extensively, and they certainly would have assumed their readers knew rhetoric.
An analogy would be the mass-produced furniture we can purchase compared to Thomas Chippendale's custom-made products.
Probably what you need is a metric that better compares first-rate prose over time. Mean Dependency Distance is the best one I have read about. Unfortunately, there are no free online MDD calculators. You have to use a research tool to calculate it.
My impression is that the French developed their lucid "classical" prose style over the course of the 17th Century, but the English lagged, putting more effort into poetry.
Indeed, Gibbon actually published his first work in French, whose contemporary writing style he subsequently carried into English.
The _Decline_ probably contains (and sustains) the best English prose ever written, but the late 18th c. has lots of impressive examples (Burke, Samuel Johnson, even perhaps the Federalist Papers, etc.). It's also pretty remarkable how many of these guys hung out together in the evenings.
It seems arguable that Boswell contributed more to modern prose style than his famous mentor did.
That's funny--maybe you're right. I admit to having read maybe one essay by Johnson yet I read his biography (which was not a great use of time).
> Has anyone calculated Steve Sailer's Flesch-Kincaid level in his columns?
Why bother? Start with some more basic questions, like "is Flesch-Kincaid level related, even tenuously, to reading comprehension?"
> Modern writing advice is always "reduce passive sentences to as near zero as possible"
You'll notice that a healthy majority of the people providing that advice aren't able to distinguish passive sentences from active ones.
I agree that there is a debate to be had on how useful Flesch-Kincaid is or isn't for whatever purpose. It WOULD seem to be an item of Sailerian interest simply because it's quantifiable. I don't ever recall Steve writing about it but I;m sure he must have at some point.
(Related, maybe: a wise person once said: "Once a measure becomes a target, it's no longer a good measure.")
I read Flesch's bestseller when I was about 13. I don't remember too much, though.
You must mean "Why Johnny Can't Read—And What You Can Do About It."
The advice to reduce one's use of the passive voice is good. A lot of writers overuse it and (IMO) it comes across as wishy-washy and gives the impression the writer is trying to lessen the appearance of responsibility on the part of the person doing the action.
Yes, it suggests a lack of conviction and courage....
Most writers could really use an editor. Most writers should remember that the first sentence of each paragraph should be a topic sentence. Most writers should remember shorter paragraphs are better. When seeing a paragraph that takes an entire page, one can easily identify multiple thought that should have been in separate paragraphs.
A classic case of underestimating your opponent.
Keep your head in your bum and you'll miss the most consequential presidency since Reagan, if not FDR (hopefully, without the world war and aggravated depression).
Except for the total lack of passing legislation. If Trump has any long lasting impact, it will be that Congress becomes obsolete and the U.S. becomes more like Hungary with a strong man government and no checks.
Same as his first term. Had the house and senate for two years and didn’t do a damn thing. He’ll lose congress in the midterms and then bitch about how he can’t get anything done. Unless the Israelis want it done, of course.
Giving Israel complete and total control of all US foreign policy is consequential, but not in a good way.
The dumbing down of everything, the Third World-like arbitrariness, the pretending to be putting effort into deportations: to me none of these are great signs. Trump-II is the most imperial of presidencies, but it seems to be an imperialism in the name of stupidity, narcissism, and new, shiny, louder version of boob-bait-for-the-bubbas.
What the Trump experience teaches us is that character really does matter.
Flesch-
Kincaid Speech
9.2 Trump 2017 Address to a Joint Session of Congress
9.1 Trump 2018 State of the Union
10.0 Trump 2019 State of the Union
10.4 Trump 2020 State of the Union
7.0 Trump 2025 State of the Union
6.8 Trump 2026 State of the Union
8.75 Trump Average
1.51 Trump Standard Deviation
8.3 Biden 2021 Address to a Joint Session of Congress
8.1 Biden 2022 State of the Union
7.1 Biden 2023 State of the Union
7.5 Biden 2024 State of the Union
7.75 Biden Average
0.55 Biden Standard Deviation
The modern "State of the Union speech" is a set-piece speech, written carefully by others and read (performed) by the president like an actor would do.
The data I referred to are based on a wider range of speeches, aggregating dozens of ordinary addresses.
To find these, Google around for something like "presidents flesch-kincaid trump."
_______________
See also:
"Politicians' "text to grade-level" study" at Peak Stupidity: https://peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=3299
.
Presidents' U.S.-school grade-level equivalents for their public speaking:
.
[11th grade]
- Hoover
- Carter
.
[10th grade]
- Obama
- (average Congressional speech grade-level, 1970s-1980s, at the 10th-grade level).
.
[9th grade]
- Eisenhower
- Kennedy
- Nixon
- Ford
- Clinton
- (average Congressional speech grade-level, 1950s-1960s & 1990s-2000s, at the 9th-grade level).
.
[8th grade]
- Lyndon Johnson
- Reagan
- (average Congressional speech grade-level, 1870s thru 1940s, consistently at the 8th-grade level).
.
[7th grade]
- Franklin Roosevelt
- George H W Bush
- George W Bush
.
[6th grade]
- Truman
.
[5th grade]
- Trump (first term)
.
By the last few year of the 2010s, Democrats' grade-level in their speeches had risen to a firmer, higher-end 9th-grade level; and Republicans' grade-level had fallen to the 8th-grade level. After about 2018 there was a full 1.0 grade-level split between R and D. This had never happened before back to the start of the study (1870s). (See: Steve Sailer's "Trump dumbed down the Republican Party.")
________________
You, E.H. Hail, made a claim. The data above contradict your claim. You responded with 'Google around for something like "presidents flesch-kincaid trump"', as if it were my task to support your claim. Then you pasted a link to some internet scribbler and followed it with unquantified hand-waving.
Either you are unwilling to quantify your claim, or you do not believe you have sufficient data to support your claim.
This has been studied very often over the past 20+ years. There are many published studies to find. I direct you to those.
I've never heard of this scale, so interesting! plugging everyone I can think of in.
The whole "I'm so much smarter than Trump and his stupid and ignorant supporters" line gives of a strong whiff of butt-hurt ego issues as bad as Trump's. (But he gets to be president and you don't.)
> Those who have studied it have consistently found DJT tends to speak in the 4th-to-5th grade range, far lower than most previous presidents. <
And yet his 2nd presidency--following the worst presidency in US history--has probably been the best presidency we've had since Eisenhower and Operation Wetback.
The obvious: What matters is about ideas is their truth, not their complexity. (Ex. Ptolemy's epicycles were more complex but heliocentrism while much simpler is much closer to reality.) Even less so the complexity of verbal expression.
Trump saying "Somali pirates" while crude and verbally simplistic, has the bright shining virtue of being fundamentally *true* in outlining the useless and destructive quality of some peoples, the destructions wrought by letting them settle here and the overall parasitic relationship generally between immigrants and heritage Americans. Its truth is valuable. While whole forests of trees have been felled in the name of "diversity" spew--from pre-K to college level in verbal complexity--telling destructive lies.
Likewise, Trump's invite to stand if you believe:
"The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens."
is not particularly "complex", but it fundamentally--logically and morally--true, and immensely clarifying, compared to the "complex" verbiage endlessly spewed to try and justify policies which do exactly the reverse--trash the interests of Americans in favor of foreigners.
Truth and clarity are virtues. Verbal complexity is not and if used to hide and justify rash and destructive policies is a tool of evil.
I'll put it simply: your thinking and writing in this post are good.
Thanks. Appreciate the attaboy from a long-time high-quality commenter.
Thanks for writing, AD; there was some substantive discussion of your comment at Peak Stupidity that those who find this may be interested in:
https://peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=3468
(Comments run reverse-chronological; i.e., those at the bottom are earliest and those at the top are most-recent.)
My comment starts with these words: "I used to agree with the gist of the criticism AnotherDad made in that comment. (...)"
When will we get a “Wealth of Nations” for the AI age?
You were an unusually serious adolescent.
I was into 18th Century Anglophilia (or whatever the Scottish equivalent is). My summer big books were:
Age 14: Smith, "Wealth of Nations"
Age 15: Boswell, "Life of Johnson"
Age 16: Fielding, "Tom Jones"
Smith didn't bring up the advantage of keeping all available tools and machines working constantly, but I guess that comes under "sauntering."
My brother reminded me a week ago that our grandfather's small hosiery mill (that he'd bought from bankruptcy) made unfinished socks in the 30s & 40s. Another company knitted the toe end closed. When the transfer became uncompetitive, he closed the mill and sold the equipment, as he was too old and ill to expand, and his only son had fled town to the Navy.
"...the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects in the progress of society, philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment...."
Shouldn't that be a period after "society," or is it grad school English? Funny that Smith moves to his own occupation.
I'm wondering how Smith would classify his pal James Watt, who advanced the steam engine?
Watt was no mere tinkerer, but was also expert at mechanical physics theory. Maybe he qualified as a "philosopher" at the time?
I read that book in graduate school and still have a copy. It's wonderful and does not need to be rewritten by someone pretending to tell us something entirely new.
As Steve remarks in this essay, 1776 was also a big year for history.
Steve, bet today you wish you had read the Digression on Silver.
> and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. <
Interesting that at the end, Smith--obliquely--hints at the importance of HBD.
Interesting--and deeply sad--that 250 years later--with so much scientific and technical progress and accompanying material prosperity under our belt--our "elite" discourse is has gotten considerably dumber about precisely the most important topics.
"The summer when I was 14, I read the first 300 pages of The Wealth of Nations"
Not a sentence we're likely to see in many future biographies, unless they're written in Mandarin.
Laughable that one believes that the Chinese are book readers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-read-books-in-america/
Specialization and the division of labor can take many forms. It's really a way of thinking. I've brought it up often during casual conversations with friends and neighbors. It evolved organically with my wife and I. Three kids, unconventional jobs, different natural abilities. Always quoted Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations. People smiled. It came up when I prepared a meal. Sometimes a 'gourmet' meal. Sometimes a failed experiment. Had an unrealistic sense of my own creativity.
As it turned out I was mostly good at it. I planned, shopped, prepared (often served and cleaned up) for a family of five for 25 years. Often failing when most weren't aware. Sometimes a soft 'thankyou'.
As a PhD Psychologist (and post doc Achitecture) she handled all communications with contractors, plumbers, electricians, assorted laborers and anything involving effective communication, technology and connectivity. Actually anything requiring empathy and savoir- faire.
A grad biz guy I was running a SF based Marketing Research company, I would get up early and prepare bag lunches and drawing a fun pictures on the brown bags. Often driving them to school (and leave work to pick up a sick kid). I was closest to the school(s).
This evolved out of the necessity for efficiency. It was never discussed or planned, like 'you do half and I'll do half'. Naturally we just did what we were best at and jumped in when necessity called.
There were numerous other examples. As Chairman of the local school board she handled all educational activities, school selection, teacher meetings. I helped with homework and read children books before bed. She bought and installed all technology, I washed the cars, raked leaves, changed diapers.
Anything that involved intelligence and communication skills were hers, I filled in for the rest.
Point being that 'specialization and the division of labor' goes well beyond pins and basic economics into social psychology, personal relationships, business planning, family decision making, possibly jettisoning conventional gender roles.
It's a basic approach to success well beyond the original, seminal usage.
Interestingly, as I recall Smith was less focused on the importance of the steam engine and of future technological developments in general. I guess it was still too soon to see that the Industrial Revolution was about to happen, a lot of which depended on the development of new metal-working machine tools powered by steam engines. [Somebody correct me if I am wrong about this.]
There was some story like Watt's theoretical design for the advanced steam engine pre-supposed almost perfectly circular giant cylinders made with tolerances that nobody a few years before had ever even attempted, but a factory in England had just developed that capability.
I believe Daniel Boorstin wrote about some of the paradoxes involved in thinking about manufacturing "tolerances," which were alien to the established mindset. To get to higher quality, you had to admit you weren't going to get to perfection. Or something like that. In general, the statistical mindset developed quite late.
Once you got the hand of it, though, you could vastly increase productivity through division of labor, as in Eli Whitney's "American System" for making guns out of standardized parts. You no longer needed a master gunsmith who could kludge together the entire gun, you just needed unskilled workers to stick part A in part B, assuming you could consistently manufacture A and B within your tolerances so that they would fit together X % of the time.
Right. The history of machine tools is a fascinating subject. Bunch of English genius tinkerers.
A remarkable feature of the Scottish Enlightenment is the transformation of prose. Before the Union, the Parliament of Scotland legislated in the Scottish form of English, for instance this 1704 measure concerning Dundee, which Cromwell had
"pillag'd and plundered in a most lamentable manner; as also the vast damnages and losses the toun sustained by the beatting doun of its harbour, the necessar reparation whereof was exceeding expensive and burdensome, and moreover the great charges which the toun was at by the marching and countermarching of troups throw the burgh about the time of the revolution..."
Traditional Scots has charm, but The Wealth of Nations is a literary classic.