tegwick
2d1282a61e
Restructure entity storage from per-chapter subdirectories to a flat
canonical set in output/entities/. Each entity exists as a single file;
duplicates across chapters are detected by slug collision and skipped
(first occurrence wins). Chapter views use {{ include }} transclusion
to reference shared entity files.
Add @{existing_entities} macro to extract-entities template so the LLM
knows which entities already exist and focuses on genuinely new ones.
Refactor _call_llm() from _execute_llm() for callers that handle their
own file I/O. 41 unique entities from 4 chapters (2 duplicates removed).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1.4 KiB
Porter
Definition
An urban labourer whose occupation consists of carrying goods and burdens for hire. Smith uses the porter as the exemplary case of a trade so specialised and dependent on volume of demand that it can only exist in a great town. A village or even an ordinary market-town cannot generate enough demand for carrying services to provide a porter with constant employment, making this trade the paradigmatic illustration of market-size-dependent specialisation.
Source Chapter
Book 1, Chapter 3: "That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market"
Context
The porter is introduced immediately after the chapter's thesis statement as the first concrete illustration. Smith notes that "a porter can find employment and subsistence in no other place" than a great town, establishing the principle that some trades require a minimum threshold of market activity to exist.
Economic Domain
Production
Smith's Original Wording
"A porter, for example, can find employment and subsistence in no other place. A village is by much too narrow a sphere for him; even an ordinary market-town is scarce large enough to afford him constant occupation."
Modern Interpretation
This anticipates the concept of minimum efficient scale and threshold effects in urban economics. Certain service occupations require minimum population densities to be viable — an insight formalised in central place theory (Christaller, 1933).