Specialize or generalize?
Adam Smith and uncertainty
It’s fair to say that Adam Smith liked specialization. Division of labor, he wrote, enables tremendous leaps in productivity and quality of life. Take the example of the pin-maker, who could hardly “make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty.” But now, as “[o]ne man draws out the wire; another straightens it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; [and] a fifth grinds it” and so forth, 10 laborers can manufacture 48,000 pins in a single day, with productivity rates 240 times higher.
For Smith, the division of labor increased productivity in three ways. Specialization results in the (i) “increase in dexterity in every particular workman,” (ii) the “saving of time” in switching between tasks, and (iii) the invention of machines, which “enable one man to do the work of many.”
Not every industry is ripe for “assembly-line like” division of labor, Smith writes. In agriculture, for instance, many jobs can’t be done year-round. Seed-sowers, ploughman and harrowers all need to perform their tasks during their appropriate seasons.
I sense that Smith’s thesis also doesn’t apply to office-based intellectual work, though there are big exceptions, like the classic division between product, sales and marketing teams at companies. Just imagine the balagan if everyone did all three. Creative teams are often divided too—into UX and UI designers, digital strategy people, etc.
But our world is changing super fast. We could put it in different ways: (i) through the lens of technology development—from the industrial revolution (agriculture to manufacturing) to the digital revolution (hardware to software), or (ii) by describing shifts in the dominant societal institutions—from monarchy to religion to politics to now probably Big Tech and maybe soon DAOs.
And change brings uncertainty. As children, we think our parents know everything. They operate with such clarity, create such safety for us that we believe they must be in control. Growing older, we see things we didn’t see before. We realize the overwhelming amount of uncertainty in the world.
In is precisely in this complex universe reigned by uncertainty where specialists—not generalists—excel. So argues David Epstein’s in his recent book Range. Interdisciplinary generalists triumph in our increasingly specialized world, he writes, citing examples as diverse as scientists, athletes, musicians, inventors, forecasters and others.
It’s no secret that our pea-sized attention spans are only waning. Deep focus, once a commodity, is now a luxury. Lamenting that we’re raising a notification-inundated generation has become passé; this is simply the “new normal.”
And yet, despite all the crap our two-minute attention spans get by the older generations, I wonder if this is just our brain’s way of adapting to the new interdisciplinary economy.
Could it be that this is the new manifestation of Darwinism? That moving faster, not slower, will be rewarded in the 21st century? That thinking deep won’t be as important as thinking wide?
To be sure, I feel uncomfortable making this suggestion. But then again, that’s why it’s worth entertaining.