Even Plato knew that economic specialization makes everyone better off.
My predecessor, Dominic Pino, wrote for NR last year that “free trade is how you live your life,” since international commerce is simply the economic specialization that people experience every day on a much larger scale. As Adam Smith elucidated in 1776, individuals in modern societies don’t grow their own food, make their own clothes, or build their own houses. We are driven by self-interest to do what each of us does best for others, and then we trade our work for the different fruits of everyone else’s labor.
To critics of economic liberalism, excessive specialization is a symptom of modernity’s sickness. Karl Marx despised how, unlike the simple craftsman, workers on the assembly line were “alienated” from their own labor by monotonous tasks. Critics on the right today lament a loss of self-sufficiency — mostly on the national level, but among families and communities, too.
Economic specialization is not a newfangled concept in the arc of human history, however. It has been with us since men hunted and women gathered. Much later than that, but still in the ancient period, specialization featured prominently in Plato’s most influential work, The Republic.
In that dialogue, the character of Socrates sets about designing a just city as a macrocosm of the human soul. Literally the first thing he describes as necessary is for different men in the city to take up different jobs and serve one another:
“Well then,” I said, “a city, as I believe, comes into being because each of us isn’t self-sufficient but is in need of much. . . . So, then, when one man takes on another for one need and another for another need, and, since many things are needed, many men gather in one settlement as partners and helpers, to this common settlement we give the name city, don’t we?”
Each person in the city has many needs, so Socrates asks how they can all be best fulfilled:
“How will the city be sufficient to provide for this much? Won’t one man be a farmer, another the homebuilder, and still another a weaver? . . . Must each of them put his work at the disposition of all in common—for example, must the farmer, one man, provide food for four and spend four times as much time and labor in the provision of food and then give it in common to the others; or must he neglect them and produce a fourth part of the food in a fourth part of the time and use the other three parts for the provision of a house, clothing, and shoes, not taking the trouble to share in common with others, but minding his own business for himself?”
Socrates’s interlocutor responds with an instinct for independence — that the latter model of each providing for his own needs is perhaps easier than the former model of specialized labor. Socrates responds in turn:
“I myself also had the thought when you spoke that, in the first place, each of us is naturally not quite like anyone else, but rather differs in his nature; different men are apt for the accomplishment of different jobs. . . . And what about this? Who would do a finer job, one practicing many arts, or one man one art?
The interlocutor agrees that one man focusing on one art would do a finer job.
“So, on this basis each thing becomes more plentiful, finer, and easier when one man, exempt from other tasks, does one thing according to nature . . .”
From this principle, Socrates’s humble city of just a few men explodes into a sprawling network of specialized labor to maximize efficient production:
“For the farmer, as it seems, won’t make his own plow himself, if it’s going to be a fine one, or his hoe, or the rest of the tools for farming; and the housebuilder won’t either—and he needs many too. And it will be the same with the weaver and the shoemaker . . . So carpenters, smiths, and many other craftsmen of this sort become partners in our little city, making it into a throng.”
Counterintuitively, the community gets much stronger as it becomes more interdependent. And finally, Socrates shows how naturally this principle extends beyond the city’s borders:
“And further,” I said, “just to found the city itself in the sort of place where there will be no need of imports is pretty nearly impossible. . . . Then, there will also be a need for still other men who bring to it what’s needed from another city.”
And thus, reciprocal trade:
“Now, if the agent comes empty-handed, bringing nothing needed by those from whom they take what they themselves need, he’ll go away empty-handed, won’t he? . . . Then they must produce at home not only enough for themselves but also the sort of thing and in the quantity needed by those others of whom they have need.”
From this perspective, a community receiving more in imports than it relinquishes in exports — what we nowadays call running a trade deficit — seems like an unbelievable steal. Year after year, the United States is getting more valuable goods from other countries than it has to give up in return. That’s what can happen when your city’s economy is going so well that trade partners would rather invest money there than merely take something from it.