discuss the relationship between marginal product and total product in 6 marks
Answers
Explanation:
Total product is simply the output that is produced by all of the employed workers. Marginal product is the additional output that is generated by an additional worker. With a second worker, production increases by 5 and with the third worker it increases by 6. When these workers are added, the marginal product increases. What factors would cause this? As more workers are added, they are able to divide the respective tasks and specialize. When the marginal product is increasing, the total product increases at an increasing rate. If a business is going to produce, they would not want to produce when marginal product is increasing, since by adding an additional worker the cost per unit of output would be declining.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote about the advantages of the division of labor using the example of a pin maker. He pointed out that an individual not educated to the business could scarce make one pin a day and certainly not more than twenty. But the business of pin making is divided up into a number of peculiar trades and each worker specializes in that trade. “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.” As a result, these ten people are able to produce upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.