(p.364) In the opening pages of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes how pins are made in a factory: "One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it,"' and so on to eighteen distinct operations. Some workers may perform two or three of these tasks; many repeatedly execute only one operation. In contemporary industrial societies, many people work at analogues of Smith's jobs: jobs in which persons are hired to perform series of set actions such as assembly line work, keypunching, or being a clerk on an automated checkout line.2 These routine...