Editing Charles Babbage (section)

===="Babbage principle"====
In ''Economy of Machinery'' was described what is now called the "Babbage principle". It pointed out commercial advantages available with more careful [[division of labour]]. As Babbage himself noted, it had already appeared in the work of [[Melchiorre Gioia]] in 1815.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Julio Segura|author2=Carlos Rodríguez Braun|title=An Eponymous Dictionary of Economics: A Guide To Laws And Theorems Named After Economists|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Z6Oy4L-6LSwC&pg=PA13|access-date=18 April 2013|year=2004|publisher=Edward Elgar Publishing|isbn=978-1-84542-360-5|page=13}}</ref> The term was introduced in 1974 by [[Harry Braverman]].<ref>{{cite book|title=Work|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0332ru3Rx0sC&pg=PA39|year=2011|publisher=Polity|isbn=978-0-7456-4678-7|page=39}}</ref> Related formulations are the "principle of multiples" of [[Philip Sargant Florence]], and the "balance of processes".<ref>{{cite book|author=P. Sargant Florence|title=The Logic of British and American Industry: A Realistic Analysis of Economic Structure and Government|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QLgCocKRIkAC&pg=PA51|year=1953|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0-415-31350-6|page=51}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=The Theory of the Growth of the Firm [Electronic book]|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aigWHVhP5tsC&pg=PA68|year=1995|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-828977-7|page=68}}</ref>

What Babbage remarked is that skilled workers typically spend parts of their time performing tasks that are below their skill level. If the labour process can be divided among several workers, labour costs may be cut by assigning only high-skill tasks to high-cost workers, restricting other tasks to lower-paid workers.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Giddens, Anthony|author2=Held, David|title=Classes, Power and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates|url=https://archive.org/details/classespowerconf00ials|url-access=registration|access-date=18 April 2013|year=1982|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-04627-6|page=[https://archive.org/details/classespowerconf00ials/page/155 155]}}</ref> He also pointed out that training or apprenticeship can be taken as fixed costs; but that [[returns to scale]] are available by his approach of standardisation of tasks, therefore again favouring the [[factory system]].<ref>{{cite book|author=Guang-Zhen Sun|title=Readings in the Economics of the Division of Labor: The classical tradition|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Y16MEasCqicC&pg=PA10|year=2005|publisher=World Scientific|isbn=978-981-270-127-5|page=10}}</ref> His view of [[human capital]] was restricted to minimising the time period for recovery of training costs.<ref name="ArtiguesCalvet2007">{{cite book|author1=Pere Mir Artigues|author2=Josep Gonza ́lez Calvet|title=Funds, Flows and Time: An Alternative Approach to the Microeconomic Analysis of Productive Activities|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=s1n1LWVyTWoC&pg=PA72|year=2007|publisher=Springer|isbn=978-3-540-71291-6|page=72 note 15}}</ref>