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Vīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna Podcast

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by Ash Stuart

125 episodes

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Exploring innovation, progress and achievement: a first-principles approach to everything that matters; combining history, epistemology, economics, anthropology, geopolitics, finance, philology, etymology and more... for, life is short, knowledge forever. <a href="https://ashstuart.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">ashstuart.substack.com</a>

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9/20/2024

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Recent Episodes

July 10, 2026

The Story of Money: Exploring Abundance

They say things like love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Back in <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p//ecfin011-the-story-of-money-understanding-scarcity">Episode 011</a> we looked at scarcity, let’s now flip the coin!Furthermore, under that topic we explored how scarcity is indeed the mother of the invention of the very discipline of economics, so is this about, given a future state of abundance, in fact escaping economics?We broadly know what abundance is, it’s what our political leaders have been promising us from time immemorial, a promise whose fulfilment, one might say, remains perpetually an election cycle away! Anyways, now that we have established what it isn’t, let’s take a proper look at what it might be.Abundance can be a bit formally defined as the presence of unlimited, or practically unlimited, quantity of a given resource. Abundance of any resource can occur naturally, like water next to a large river, or is man-made. As we’ve explored previously for example in discussing <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p//ecfin004-the-story-of-money-on-the-worth-of-value-and-gain">value creation</a>, human wants being much greater than what’s naturally available (Nature: here’s some water, berries, a few trees. Man: cool cool, but how about a thousand types of cheese, a hundred varieties of fermented hop and grape with fancy names and notes, a pocket device to send unlimited cat pictures), we humans have to step up to produce them - raw materials to finished goods.And is thus born a discipline such as economics to help direct the act of production in the best possible way -- not just in maximizing production but also ensuring an ecologically sound way of doing so -- leading to a whole bunch of concepts we’ve already covered in this series (capital/resource, the market, price, risk, debt, specialization, standardization etc)Rolling Dice or Flipping the Coin?Thus the logical progression has been to explore how to utilize fields such as economics to improve technology such that we can arrive at a state of abundance in many areas, a few obvious high-priority ones being food, clothing and other essentials.But then, if we say economics is concerned with scarcity, there can arise the reasonable question: is seeking abundance via this discipline not a contradiction, will it not be counterproductive, is it a paradox?I would offer that there need be no problem on those grounds - but I’ll caveat that different political philosophers have taken strongly different positions on this. But here’s one line of thinking: scarcity and abundance being two sides of the same coin, it’s by understanding and managing scarcity well that we may even seek to mitigate or eliminate it. (Doctors study diseases not to spread them but cure them?)In other words, isn’t it the case that if economic concepts and their practical applications are managed properly, there is room for ushering in greater abundance, as we have seen in a great many items since the dawn of the industrial age (just compare the modern middle class and their consumptive insistence with the medieval peasantry and their precarious subsistence.) And the onus of getting that right is on us humans rather than anything else?From Paucity to PlentyLet’s go back to the middle ages, imagine you happened to do some time-travel, back to the year 1000. Imagine you told a peasant tilling the field that one day in the future you will be able to send a message to the other end of the earth for practically zero cost. Forget one message, you could even send a thousand, and in fact folk would be tired of how many messages they’re getting from across the world every single day!We may safely guess that they would have you burnt at the stake for witchcraft! But let’s pause to think about this witchcraft! Back in the year 1000 only kings, and a few noblemen, could afford to send out a message beyond the confines of their town or local region. It required a man on a horse, food and supplies, the risk of going through bandit territory, days or weeks, and then, often no certainty he even made it. (And of course widespread was the practice that if the other king or nobleman didn’t like the message, they’d shoot the messenger, but I digress..)Fast-forward to the industrial revolution: the telegraph, revolutionary but you still had to count every word, then the telephone, eventually email and SMS, text messaging on the iPhone while still in bed with eyes half closed at 6am!Assuming the monthly subscription costs baked in as a given, what is really the cost of sending a single message today, do we even think or blink about it, about how long it’s getting, how many words are being used!So yes, we’ve come a long way. With regard to the information industry, we have indeed achieved abundance. (And are confronting new challenges such as information overload, but that’s another story!)With the ever-accelerating advances in machine intelligence, robotics, space and related areas, there is a chance that within our lifetime, if managed properly, we could get to abundance in many more areas, including, as I discuss elsewhere in depth, material commodities such as food and clothing.In the meantime, the best we can do is develop a greater awareness of the underlying concepts that economics offers us to start with?Article written by Ash StuartImages, video, voice narration and some footnotes generated by AINothing in this presentation constitutes as advice - financial, investment or other This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://ashstuart.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">ashstuart.substack.com</a>

July 3, 2026

The Story of Money: Meeting Adam Smith

It is said about ‘the classics’, or classical literature that everyone has an opinion on them but nobody’s read them. In this decimilestone episode of the series, we meet the author of one such great classic work relevant to our subject.A Fertile IslandNo man is an island, it’s also said, and no great cultural and intellectual output emerges from a vacuum. Let’s explore the context and the background before we get to the person.In my parallel series on human achievement (tecc), I’ve traced the evolution of human intellectual progress from the earliest days. By the time we get to the 1700s, there arose in Scotland an effervescence of intellectual output which has been termed the Scottish Enlightenment which developed within the fertile soil of the wider British context of rapid innovation setting the stage for the industrial revolution in Britain shortly thereafter. The Enlightenment within Britain itself was part of a wider movement in Western Europe as a break from the medieval past (all of which I’ve been covering in the said other series with more to come.)It was into this milieu of extraordinary intellectual output that was born Adam Smith. Adam Smith in a sense needs no introduction. He’s widely regarded as the ‘father of economics’ or even the ‘father of capitalism’. (Although check out <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p//tecc48-seeking-symmetry-finding-balance-making-harmony">TecC 48</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p//tecc49-foreseeing-new-frontiers-integrating-novel-instruments-creating-unprecedented-value">TecC 49</a>.) Smith is seen as having pioneered the idea of so-called ‘free-market capitalism’, and based on who you ask, unfettered economic activity and industrial expansion with profit-seeking as the sole motive, and with the State moving out of the way with no role to play. And of course such ideas are claimed to have been crystallized by him in his landmark book ‘The Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, or simply ‘The Wealth of Nations’.But was he really all that and was that really his tenet, message and goal?Notions and SentimentsMuch as some people may love to hate this Gordon-Gekko image of Smith, I have disappointing news for them - he was indeed a very different person than his popular caricature. He was first and foremost a moral philosopher mainly concerned about understanding and improving the human condition, in particular that of the less fortunate sections of society.This manifests in what might in fact be an even greater work of his, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ published much earlier, and so thought even by the author himself. Even though some of the notions of morality and similar values have changed in the two and a half centuries that have passed since, scholarly research and opinion have pointed out some ‘surprisingly modern’ treatment by Smith on these topics, such as, as per research, around concepts like mutual empathy, egalitarianism, individual sovereignty, and human dignity.An Inquiry in EarnestSo his subsequent inquiry into economic questions that form the substance of his more famous work can be traced to stem from this deep concern for improving the human condition as just mentioned. Let’s take a few examples of this as emanating from that work.We saw in the previous episode his description of the notion of division of labor as underpinning (sorry, can’t help the pun) the new economic system that was emerging leading to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, an economic system others later, approvingly or disapprovingly, have called ‘capitalism’.In the episode on specialization I mentioned how the philosopher Karl Marx, perhaps the one person most opposed to the so-called ‘capitalism’, railed against specialization. Now guess what, in fact Adam Smith in his discussion of the division of labor expressed deep concerns on the same matter.Let’s next look at the other popular misnotion: that a ‘free market’ should be allowed to operate unfettered by the interference of the State. Adam Smith’s work evinced no such ideological position. Smith expressly insisted that the State had a very specific role in ensuring the good functioning of markets and the well-being of society thereof. As part of this, he explicitly called for State programmes, such as on-going access to public education, to help alleviate the sense of loss of dignity that can arise by being a small cog in a big industrial wheel. Yes, don’t take my word for it, he said it!And perhaps most strikingly, he looked upon wealthy merchants who then try to game the market system to their incumbent advantage - the fatcats as we may call them, with extreme scorn. (”...the mean rapacity and monopolizing spirit of the merchants and manufacturers...”)He spoke of their oligarchic tendencies to form cartels, to stifle new competition, to bend the State with tax preferences and protective tariffs, to suit their own interests...A more recent economist, or a few of them, have spoken about the need to “save Capitalism from the Capitalists”. While Smith wouldn’t have used such terms in his time, he was probably the first man (he wasn’t named ‘Adam’ for nothing!) to recognize and express the danger of such excessive concentration of wealth and power by people who rose within the system as posing the biggest threat to the system that made them!Ultimately, all these need to be taken in context, not just the ‘contemporary context’ I provided above, but for us looking back into the past and connecting it to the present, a wider evolutionary or historical context.Adam Smith in essence sought to debunk an older economic (and political) system that had existed into his lifetime.We may think our system is bad, and most of us would agree it’s not perfect (what is?) but to understand what we have, we must, as I’ll come back to, recognize how awful the system before it was. And it is in this light that we must look at what Adam Smith did: describe and help elevate an economic system that was, and despite everything remains, a huge improvement over what existed before.Article written by Ash StuartImages, video, voice narration and some footnotes generated by AINothing in this presentation constitutes as advice - financial, investment or otherFurther Reading & Reference* <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p/tech-06-the-first-great-acceleration-the-birth-of-industry-the-revolution-that-changed-everything">TecC 06 - The First Great Acceleration: The Birth of Industry</a> - The Revolution othat changed Everything* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67363">The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith - Gutenberg</a>* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300">An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations - Gutenberg</a> This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://ashstuart.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">ashstuart.substack.com</a>

June 26, 2026

The Story of Money: Division of Labor

Back in <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p//ecfin013-the-story-of-money-understanding-specialization">Episode 013</a> we looked at specialization, let’s now look at a very closely related concept.Just as in that episode, the fictional anchor for this episode is going to be the story already narrated in <a target="_blank" href="https://ashstuart.substack.com/p//tecc43-making-work-art-making-art-work-engineering-excellence">TecC 43</a>, where we saw how, after a disastrous start in a joint initiative, with everyone stepping on everyone else’s toes, our four fictional friends eventually manage to allocate each of themselves specific areas of focus and work things out.The Coordinates of CooperationWhat they do can be explained either as specialization or division of labor, in fact it’s kinda both - it’s the division of labor that allows for specialization to take place. And in the specialization episode, we correspondingly focused on some of the more human elements of the phenomenon, given that specifically relates to one’s role, identity etc, here let’s look at a few other parameters.We can in fact look at division of labor as related to process more than the people per se. It’s the overall system of coordination, cooperation and indeed specialization.There are thus the questions of how the overall set of activities is broken up into discrete parts each of which can be handled separately from the others but in tandem, whether simultaneously or in sequence. Beyond this, there’s the question of how the coordination/cooperation is ensured or enforced.All this said, there has to be a certain amount of scale to justify division of labor: the requirement of making artisanal jam to be sold over a full week of an annual market event justified our fictional friends in the fictional story to apply these concepts. But if it was just a matter of preparing 3 jars of jams to gift a visiting aunt, it’s probably best done solo. (Hello aunt Margaret, what time are you arriving this weekend? And don’t worry I have a team of 12 people working on a small gift for you!)Pinning it DownThe classic example of division of labor in economics literature is the famous one provided by Adam Smith in his landmark work on the subject: the pin factory. He contrasts a solitary worker with a specialized team of 10 workers. Having broken down the overall task of making a pin into 18 subtasks, such as drawing the wire, straightening it, cutting it, making it a pointy on one end, adding a head on the other and so on... The contrast Smith draws is the sole worker’s handful, about 20 pins a day to the ten-worker team’s around 48,000 pins in a day!The Division that MultipliesThat’s roughly 4800 per worker, where applying division of labor has yielded an improvement of 2,400 X. We can appreciate some of the factors that make any such improvement possible. Apart from allowing each worker to become more dexterous in their task at focus, and avoiding the costs of code-switching both by way of cognitive load and the time lost in the transitions, this division of labor and the intense focus can facilitate the discovery of better techniques or even newer labor-saving tools, as Smith outlines. This way, as we delegate more and more of these subtasks to technology - new tools built specifically to handle them, we save ourselves of the drudge. So paradoxically division of labor itself might be helping us rid ourselves of the monotony of division of labor?There are other advantages too, it’s more viable to find a substitute worker or quickly train one for one particular task should the original worker not be available for some reason, since there is less of a learning curve. This of course entails lower disruption and downtime and thus increased overall productivity.Division of Labor exists everywhere in our modern world. For example, much of the music we are used to enjoying would be impossible - imagine your favorite rockstar hopping between the drums, the bass and singing mic + guitar all at once! Imagine how much more time and effort it would take to make the movies, fabricate the machines, build the buildings we are all used to seeing around us, if at all!In fact in the modern world, even the simplest device is the result of extensive division of labor. As the author Matt Ridley has said, nobody, no single individual, knows how to make a computer mouse! ***I mentioned Adam Smith given it’s sort of mandatory to do so when discussing this concept, but I haven’t introduced him in the series yet, the father of economics in a series relating to economics! I had originally planned to introduce the topic of division of labor alongside Adam Smith in the same episode, but then, that wouldn’t be division of labor, would it?So yes, we shall next meet the man himself, buckle up!Article written by Ash StuartImages, video, voice narration and some footnotes generated by AINothing in this presentation constitutes as advice - financial, investment or otherFurther Reading & Reference* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTLizne1uNw">Who knows how to make a computer mouse? - Matt Ridley</a> This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://ashstuart.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">ashstuart.substack.com</a>

125 total episodes available

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What is Vīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna Podcast?: Exploring innovation, progress and achievement: a first-principles approach to everything that matters; combining history, epistemology, economics, anthropology, geopolitics, finance, philology, etymology and more... for, life is short, knowledge forever. <a href="https://ashstuart.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">ashstuart.substack.com</a>
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Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
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