… is from page 500 of James Otteson’s excellent essay “Adam Smith and the Right,” which is chapter 29 in Ryan Patrick Hanley, ed., Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (2016):
The increasing productivity that the division of labor enables, therefore, is possible only when individuals are allowed both to specialize and to capitalize on their locally gathered and unique knowledge. Since a community’s relative level of prosperity depends on the degree to which division of labor takes place within it, Smith’s argument holds that prosperity itself depend on decentralization.
