Quote from: mOgliE on January 21, 2019, 09:39:20 AM

Quote from: Spendulus on January 19, 2019, 01:10:25 AM

It's simply not possible to characterize such ideas as bullshit.

Well, yes it is ^^

First of all: the global book is bullshit. It doesn't mean there is NOTHING of value in it at all. Of course there a few ideas worth thinking about.

It's exactly like Marx's Das Kapital but in worse. None of Marx or Smith foresaw the revolution we would get thanks to technology but at least Marx thinking was relevant from his point of view. Smith is just an oversimplification of real world resulting in a reasonning so simple it just cannot be true. Hence global bullshit, exactly like Aristote.

Second: Jack of all trades isn't one of them.

The idea of Jack of all trades is more or less stupid:
-It forgets all the good aspects of preventing intense specialization
-It greatly underestimate the ability of important capital to highjack a whole part of an industry hence the power a small number of people can have, limiting his ideal of "fair competition"
-It just doesn't take advertisement into account

I would gladly discuss Smith theories but shouldn't we make a dedicated thread? seems to go a lot of topic compared to original subject.

Well, so far you've categorized three of the "Great Books of the Western World" as bullshit - Aristotle, Marx, and Smith. Moving right along aren't we?

RE "Jack of all trades is more or less stupid"...

Here is a current day discussion of "mass production."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_production

Mass production is a diverse field, but it can generally be contrasted with craft production or distributed manufacturing. Some mass production techniques, such as standardized sizes and production lines, predate the Industrial Revolution by many centuries; however, it was not until the introduction of machine tools and techniques to produce interchangeable parts were developed in the mid 19th century that modern mass production was possible.[2]

Smith's treatise, look at the date. It is the initial comprehensive study of what was then emergent as the industrial revolution.