The pros and cons of specialisation
(Introduction to Economics, Lesson 9)
The concept of specialisation is essentially a very simple one.
Imagine a primitive society where each individual is self-sufficient and provides for their own individual needs entirely by themselves. They each go hunting by themselves, they fish in the river, they collect nuts and berries from the woods, they each start their own fires and they do their own individual cooking. They build and maintain their own shelters and make their own clothes.
This might not sound like a bad lifestyle, but it isn’t a very efficient one. Each individual will be good at some tasks, but not very good at others and each individual will be wasting a lot of time moving from one task to another.
Imagine, instead, that we organise this society so that each person concentrates on one or two tasks that they happen to be particularly good at. They get the other things they need by trading with other people in the village.
Some people, for example, might become full-time fishermen. They concentrate on this particular task and become rather good at it. They develop special tools to help them work more efficiently. At the end of each day’s fishing, they have far more fish than they need for themselves, so they trade their surplus of fish for other things. Some people become specialist hunters, some gather nuts and berries — and so on.
The effects of such a reorganisation can be much more dramatic than you might imagine. Rather than producing just a minor improvement in food production, the villagers might well find that their lives are radically transformed. Instead of barely managing to survive, they might soon find themselves producing a considerable surplus. Instead of having to spend all their time providing essentials, they can now spend time on leisure pursuits, games and entertainment. They can spend time exploring and experimenting. They can provide themselves with luxury items or trade their surpluses for goods from other villages.
Further specialisation might see people becoming carpenters or blacksmiths who can provide tools for other people to work even more efficiently. In time, there may be dozens or, in a larger community, even hundreds of specialised occupations and a complex trading system to enable everyone to trade their surpluses for the other things they need or want.
When the production of even a single product is split into separate tasks and these tasks are split between different people, this type of specialisation is known as ‘the division of labour’ and often produces spectacular further increases in production. With this division of labour, not only are people specialising in the production of one particular product, they are often specialising in just one of the many specific tasks that are required in that production process.
Ask people how we developed our rich, modern societies and they might well point to the benefits of technology. In many ways, however, it is actually the benefits of specialisation that are more fundamentally important in improving our living standards.
Even the benefits of advanced technology are only possible thanks to specialisation. From blacksmiths to nuclear scientists, people have developed their technological knowledge, skills and expertise by being able to specialise in their particular area of study. They’ve been able to do this only because other people have specialised in such things as producing food and building houses. How far would we have got at developing our technology if everyone had to produce all their own food for themselves?
Fast forward to today, however, and it’s important to ask ourselves whether specialisation has gone too far. We can all see how having someone specialise as a blacksmith or as a doctor can have enormous benefits for society. Some jobs today, however, are so ludicrously specialised, we might wonder whether they have any real purpose at all. Does a ‘Diversity Enhancement Manager’ really provide a useful function for society?
And we also have to remember that greater specialisation requires a more complex trading arrangement — and that there are significant costs and problems that can be caused by having a complicated trading system. Financial crises, for example, are often essentially caused by a breakdown in trading procedures. Some people fail to pay what they owe for goods they’ve been supplied. Consequently, other people can’t pay what they owe and so on until we have a widespread crisis on our hands. Greater specialisation requires a more complicated trading arrangement — and the more complex it is, the more likely it is to break down and the bigger the problems when it does break down.
And then there’s the whole question of the negative effects that specialisation can have on workers. It’s easy to see why someone might rather enjoy specialising as a musician or as an aircraft designer, but many jobs are specialised in a way that doesn’t make working life fun at all. We can see how a great sense of fulfilment can be achieved by specialising as a car designer or even as an ordinary mechanic, but what about someone who just put tyres on wheels — and that’s all they ever do whilst at work?
When people specialise in a task such as fitting a particular piece of plastic to a particular model of car all day long or spend all day assembling the same damn model of smartphone for long hours, day after day, you can see how repetition and boredom can — in some cases, quite literally — sap people’s will to live. Some Chinese factories where people mass produce well-known technology products have experienced some alarmingly high suicide rates.
Effectively, many people in the modern world are forced to specialise to such a degree that it takes all the interest and variety out of their work. Can that really be good for those individuals or even for society in general? It may appear to be an efficient and productive way of working, but is it? Might the repetition and boredom in fact be a price that isn’t worth paying? Might such specialisation actually result in far more problems than it is worth?