"The answer is that Smith saw the all-important division of labor as a once-for-all, not a continuing, process. As has been recently pointed out, he did not see the organizational and technological core of the division of labor as a self-generating process of change, but as a discrete advance that would impart its stimulus and then disappear. Thus, in the very long run the growth momentum of society would come to a halt—Smith once mentions two hundred years as the longest period over which a society could hope to flourish. Thereafter the laborer would return to his subsistence wages, the capitalist to the modest profits of a stable market, and the landlord alone might enjoy a somewhat higher income as food production remained at the levels required by a larger, although no longer growing, population. For all its optimistic boldness, Smith’s vision is bounded, careful, sober—for the long run, even sobering."