A. I, Pencil I thought was a brilliant story written by Leonard Read. I loved how he took something so simple, that is produced so easily and taken for granted by 99.9% of users and turned it into something as complex as making a car. Of the three pieces that I have read so far for class, I, Pencil gets me to have an EWOT the best. It’s impossible to not stop and think of how important the production of a pencil is to the global economy from both a using it and making it stand point. People are employed all over the world to make the globally used writing utensil. The story seems counterintuitive first, because one has to think that something that seems as simple as a pencil could be made from scratch from a wide variety of people, but when you start to think about it and where the resources come from to produce a pencil, it starts to become more intuitive that there may not be a person who knows how to make a pencil from scratch. This story makes you realize that not everything is as easy as it seems and sometimes it takes the efforts of numerous people to solve a simple task or make a simple thing that can change the lives of many.
B. I, Pencil talks about how there is $4,000,000 in machinery in the factory to help make pencils, do you think that it would be better economically for both the company and society if the company did not have this machinery and instead hired workers to put the pencils together by hand with minimal help from machinery?
What do you think the reasoning is that not a single person knows, or took the time to learn how to make a pencil without outside sources or help?
C. I, Pencil has a simple message in it that is two heads are better than one. It talks about how many people and skills are needed to produce something so simple like a pencil. Without all of the different people’s help, a pencil will not be able to be made because no one man on earth knows how to make a pencil from scratch without the help and resources of others. The story coveys the idea that this is how people should make important decisions. Get the opinions from others so that different ideas can be formulated together to make the best economical event occur.
You ask a good question in point B and this is a commonly asked question in economics. Let's consider this more deeply, as you will hear in the news and popular media a lot that machines are replacing people and thus we will run out of jobs. Read the chapter in Hazlitt, "economics in one lesson" on the interplay between technology and jobs. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-the-Luddites-Really-Fought-Against.html?c=y&page=2 These guys were scared technology would take away their jobs. Think too on whether consumers should pay much higher prices for products so that labor can be used in production, at a higher cost, than machines and technology. Does this make sense as a policy? We will learn more about this topic and theme throughout the course and maybe we will discuss this on Friday.
ReplyDeleteIs it bad that not a single person today could produce or even understand how to fully produce a pencil from start to finish? Is this a problem?