"Specialization in this world is rudimentary and self-sufficiency characterizes most individual households"
"Previously men could be divided into the learned and the unlearned, … But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these categories … We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned."
"The last of Smith’s regrettable failures is one for which he is overwhelmingly famous – the division of labor. How can it be that the famous opening chapters of his book, and the pin factory he gave immortality, can be considered a failure? Are they not cited as often as any passages in all economics? Indeed, over the generations they are. The failure is different: almost no one used or now uses theory of division of labor, for the excellent reason that there is scarcely such a theory. … there is no standard, operable theory to describe what Smith argued to be the mainspring of economic progress. Smith gave the division of labor an immensely convincing presentation – it seems to me as persuasive a case for the power of specialization today as it appeared to Smith. Yet there is no evidence, so far as I know, of any serious advance in theory of the subject since his time, and specialization is not an integral part of the modern theory of production, which may well be an explanation for the fact that the modern theory of economies of scale is little more than a set of alternative possibilities."
"Just as it is inconceivable that human society would have evolved to its present state without language, it is inconceivable that we would have gotten to this point without specialization and trade. Moreover, in order for society to progress further, patterns of specialization and trade must continue to evolve."
"The idea of expertise in any one area of the humanities, with its subsequent phenomenon of faculty recruitment by time framed "slots," was always mistaken. It was inspired, in this masculine pioneer country that has never taken the arts seriously, by nervous emulation of the sciences, where one can indeed deeply and profitably specialize in moths, ferns, or igneous rocks. But there is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities."
"The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness."
"The market system, as it gets more specialized, will give more and more to the top people. If we were back in 1800 and we were all working on farms, youd probably be worth more a little more than I am, because youd work harder and be stronger. But the top person working at a farm would be worth one-and-a-half to maybe two times what the bottom person was. But as we get more and more specialized, the guy that is the best at knocking out some other guy who weighs two hundred pounds is worth ... thirty million dollars a fight. Now, hes worth thirty million dollars a fight because someone invented television and cablevision. As we get more specialized, the rich will get even richer."