EmpiricalRequires evidence

Specialisation is the precondition of expertise, and Part I puts it in the plainest possible terms: if you have to spend six hours a day tending the fields to feed yourself you are unlikely to make a good doctor, and you certainly will not have time for medical research. Pools of experts experimenting toward a breakthrough exist only because agricultural and industrial specialisation let more be produced with less labour, freeing part of the population for everything else. The same argument covers sanitation and public health, which need governmental structures only a highly productive economy can sustain. This is Hidalgo's personbyte reached from the other direction: Hidalgo asks how much knowhow one person can hold, Part I asks how many people a society can spare to hold any.

Capital mechanisms