Thanks for all the nice feedback on my column this morning. It’s particularly encouraging because I wrote it last week, in advance of the three-day column, and “evergreens” are the hardest columns to write. Here’s the opener:
No one in the world knows how to make the computer monitor you are looking at (and, if you’re reading this on your phone, iPad, or Kindle, no one knows how to make those things either).
Even the best editor in the world has no clue how to make a printing press or ink, or how to operate a communications satellite.
This is hardly a new insight. In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
The pencil tells the story of its own creation. The wood comes from Oregon, or perhaps California. The lead, which is really graphite, is mined in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The eraser, which is not rubber but something called “factice,” is “made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.”
To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?
The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling….
Meanwhile, speaking of humbling, did you know that Paul Krugman was crushed in a debate with a pencil?