•‘When manufactures have advanced to a certain pitch of greatness, the fabrication of the instruments of trade becomes itself the object of a great number of very important manufactures’ (WN IV.viii.1).
•‘[T]he mechanism of increasing returns is not to be discerned adequately by observing the effects of variations in the size of an individual firm or of a particular industry’ (1928A: 539).
•The economies that manifest themselves in increasing returns ‘lie under our eyes, but we may miss them if we try to make of large-scale production (in the sense of production by large firms or large industries), as contrasted with large production, any more than an incident in the general process by which increasing returns are secured and if accordingly we look too much at the individual firm or even … at the individual industry’ (ibid.: 531, italics original).
•The ‘division of labour among industries’ (1928A).
•‘[T]he progressive division and specialisation of industries is an essential part of the process by which increasing returns are realised’ (ibid.: 537).
•Also manifests itself in the increasing use of ‘capitalistic or roundabout methods of production’ (ibid.: 531, 539).
•‘[A]n increasingly intricate nexus of specialised undertakings has inserted itself between the producer of raw materials and the consumer of the final product’ (ibid.: 538).
•‘Auxiliary’ and ‘ancillary’ industries emerge, reaping economies that are otherwise ‘segregated’ (ibid.: 539).
•‘Adam Smith’s dictum amounts to the theorem that the division of labour depends in large part upon the division of labour. … Every important advance in the organisation of production … alters the conditions of industrial activity and initiates responses elsewhere in the industrial structure which in turn have a further unsettling effect. Thus change becomes progressive and propagates itself in a cumulative way’ (1928A: 533).
•‘[T]he division of labour depends upon the extent of the market, but the extent of the market also depends upon the division of labour. In this circumstance lies the possibility of economic progress …’ (ibid.: 539).
