There are many situations when it is better to not do something. Usually the value gained is too small to justify the time and effort spent. Sometimes value may even be lost. I recently read Candide, ou l’Optimisme. In this book by Voltaire we follow the exploits of Candide, the titular protagonist. As Candide travels the world, he sees experiences disaster upon disaster. Everyone he meets and talks to has similar horrible life stories. As the tale nears its conclusion we are introduced to a Venetian senator, Pococurante, who seems different. Pococurante is very well off. He's free, healthy, cultured, rich and occupies an office of high responsibility. None of these things bring him any joy however. One of his luxuries is described in the following paragraph:
Ah! voilà quatre-vingts volumes de recueils d’une académie des sciences, s’écria Martin; il se peut qu’il y ait là du bon. Il y en aurait, dit Pococurante, si un seul des auteurs de ces fatras avait inventé seulement l’art de faire des épingles; mais il n’y a dans tous ces livres que de vains systèmes, et pas une seule chose utile.
This particular paragraph rang a bell. Not so much because of the quality of Voltaire's work in and of itself, but because it reminded me of something else that I had read. Using a search engine I found the relevant text:
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth, part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.
The above quote is taken from the first chapter of Adam Smith’s An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. As Candide was published in 1759, and The wealth of nations in 1776, my first thought was that I had stumbled upon a joke by Adam Smith, in response to the complaint by Voltaire's character Pococurante. However, as it turns out, and the search engine suggested, Smith was not the first who published on the advantages of the division of labour in the manufacturing of pins. Apparently some French academics had done so earlier, and this passage may have actually been plagiarised from them. I considered looking into those French publications, but decided not to. In not knowing I find it easier to entertain the two distinct possibilities simultaneously, and laugh thrice about the same joke: First because of the absurdity of Pococurante's ennui; then because Pococurante’s complaint is answered in such an understated way by another of humanity's great thinkers; and finally because it's quite possible that one of those eighty volumes contains the very thing, the very specific thing, the lack of which Pococurante complains about.