Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is September 3, 2010, and my guest is Eland de Baton, the author

of many books, including the one we will discuss today, the pleasures and sorrows of work.

Eland, welcome to econtalk. Thank you so much. I want to say first off, this is really a beautiful

book. It's written with elegance, humor. It's full of insights into daily life, the nature of work,

and modernity. What you did is visit a wide array of people in their work lives, follow them around,

see what they do, and describe not just what you saw, but how watching those other people made you

feel. It's an utterly delightful book. And I want to start off by reading a very short excerpt.

It's found on page 35 of the paperback, where you, without perhaps intending to channel two great

economists, Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek, and you write as follows, you're going to be writing about

logistics, and you say the following. Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the

precise history and origin of nearly everyone of the limited number of things they ate and owned,

as well as other people and tools involved in their production. They were acquainted with the

pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom, and the dairy made. The range of items available for

purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has

diminished almost to the point of security. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the

manufacturer and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process

of alienation, which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt.

And one of the themes of this early part of the book is the role of specialization,

...