Classics I am now Reading ( or listening to)

I found a fabulous website from a list given in the UHEA convention handout. It is www.librivox.org . They have lots of audio books for download for free. I listened to part of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith for my Great Books of the Western World Book Club and I am listening to The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane for my Well Educated Mind Book Club. I used to read while I nursed the baby, but he’s all grown up now and I was falling behind on my reading, but this has solved my problem.

My thoughts on the Wealth of Nations so far: It is a great review of the Economic 101 class I took in college. It is actually quite interesting to think about how the “invisible hand” works to allocate resources where they need to go and the way prices are set according to supply and demand. The section on the Division of Labor was very interesting to me on how much more can be produced when people specialize because they don’t switch mindsets or spend time moving from one aspect to another. He gives the example of the safety pin, where a single man can make lie 100 pins on his own in a day, but if you divide the labor of the pin into 20 different parts, then 20 men can make like 100,000 pins (I’m not remembering the exact numbers) which is many times more than they could make individually. I wonder if there is a point where things can become too specialized though and where is the human aspect to all this. Is there a point where even though a person could make thousands of pins more in a day with a specialized group than by himself, maybe he would like to customize his pins or just make the whole thing himself?

My thoughts on The Red Badge of Courage so Far: First of all, the youth is excited to join the Union side of the Civil War only to find that he spends a lot of time waiting around and not fighting although he wonders if he would actually be as brave as he fantasizes he would be. They eventually fight and he runs off in the middle and eventually gets hungry enough to go back to his regiment. Isn’t this so like human nature? -- not wanting to get caught or punished for doing something wrong and trying to justify our actions even though we know we’re wrong. He almost wishes the Union army would lose so that he could say he was right for running!! Also, it’s hard to wait for things to happen. That would be rotten!!