Welcome to the pin factory

In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith described a pin workshop where ten workers, each doing one small part of the job, made far more pins than ten workers each making whole pins. Here you run the workshop.

Look around: drag on empty space. Zoom: scroll or pinch. Pan: right-drag or two fingers.
Divide the work: start as craft workers making whole pins, then split the job up and watch output change.
Balance the line: move workers between jobs. Piles of half-made pins build up in front of the bottleneck.
Watch the costs too: boredom, absence and the size of the market all limit what specialisation can do.
Tap a station's tag to learn what happens there.

The Pin Factory: Division of Labour

BIZ-OMICS · Economics & Business · Specialisation, productivity and its limits

Name: ____________________ Class: ________ Date: __________

Smith's pin factory

In Book I of The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith described making a pin as about eighteen distinct operations. He reported a small workshop of ten people making upwards of 48,000 pins a day, about 4,800 each, while a worker making whole pins alone could perhaps not make twenty.

Smith's three reasons for higher productivity

Dexterity: repeating one simple task makes the worker far quicker at it.
Time saved: no time lost moving between tools and tasks.
Machinery: simple, repeated tasks are easier to mechanise, and workers focused on one task often invent better tools.

The limits and costs

Monotony: in Book V Smith warned that a lifetime of a few simple operations could leave workers less engaged and less capable.
Interdependence: one absent worker or one slow stage (a bottleneck) can halt the whole line.
Extent of the market: specialisation only pays if there are enough buyers for the extra output.
Responses: job rotation, job enlargement and enrichment, multi-skilling and lean production methods.

The simulator figures are simplified teaching assumptions, not historical data.

Tell me why

Why does output per worker rise so sharply when the job is fully divided?
Why does adding a worker to a non-bottleneck job not increase output?
Why is a fully specialised line more vulnerable to one absent worker?
Why is the division of labour limited by the extent of the market?
Evaluate whether job rotation is worth the loss of some productivity.