Division, demand and supply of labour. Elements of a theory of population in Adam Smith - Lange, Jérôme
Adam Smith is wrongly regarded as being a minor figure in the history of thought on population. Commentators on Smith and population moreover have laid undue stress on his chapter on wages and the labour market in the Wealth of Nations, where Smith describes demand for labour and its supply, i.e. population growth, being adjusted through the wage rate. In fact, Smith’s theory makes a much larger part for population dynamics. Population plays a large role, indeed, in the very definition of perhaps the single most fundamental concept of his theory: the market. The extent of the market is thus described by Smith as determined in large part by the physical proximity of individual economic agents one from the other, i.e. population density. In the course of the “natural progress of opulence” from a rural-agricultural society to an urban-industrial trading nation, moreover, the progressive state of (economic) affairs is maintained by ongoing population growth and the ensuing division of labour between town and countryside, making for the growth of cities. Thus, Smith does not only formulate a theory of population growth in Wealth of Nations, but Smith’s works also comprise fundamental elements of a theory of population movements and urbanisation.
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