Transcript - Izzit.org

TRADER: Oh, champion.
WOMAN: There you are. And this is how we did it.
MAN: We divided the work into separate processes, so that each one of the ten of us specialized in just
one thing. The result was: we doubled our productivity; we produced twenty shawls in two weeks.
WOMAN: Before, using the old ways, we would have produced only ten. We’d created the extra ones
by division of labor by process.
MAN: But this time we used the surplus in a different way. We swapped it for somebody else’s surplus.
WOMAN: And the result is: we’ve now got a lot of things we couldn’t have made for ourselves.
MAN: What we discovered was: the division of labor by process has created more surplus…
WOMAN: …and by trading that surplus, we’ve taken another step along the path to prosperity. Oh, the
cooking I can do with this!
MAN: Oh, just look at that!
There are still quite a few places in the world today where division of labor by process is still at much the
same point as in our village community. Some people spin, some people weave, some people finish off
the goods. In the modern industrial world, it all looks very different, and so it is in a way, but if you
follow manufacturing through, you’ll see that it’s still divided by process in just the same way- even if it
is on a massive scale.
WOMAN: The shearing and cleaning of wool is carried out on huge commercial sheep farms. The raw
wool is spun into thread on enormous machines, with two hundred spindles that turn out twenty-three
miles of yarn a minute.
MAN: The yarn is woven on gigantic electrically-powered looms that produce almost an acre of cloth a
day. It’s dyed in special machines, and then made into goods like these, which are sent off to the docks
for export.
WOMAN: And in return…we get other people’s surplus – beautiful fruit, tea and coffee – things we
cannot produce ourselves. We don’t swap it directly the way our villagers did. We sell our products and
use the money to buy the tea, but it comes to the same thing.
MAN: And it’s made possible only because we’ve created a trading surplus, and created it through
division of labor by process, one of the foundation stones of the modern industrial world.
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