Copyright thedispatch
The most fundamental point of the essay I, Pencil by Leonard Read is that even pencil makers don’t really know how to make a pencil from scratch. They just know how to put together the last few components of the supply chain. The global division of labor is so efficient that people from all over the world can cooperate, without necessarily coordinating, to produce a pencil for pennies. A decade ago, an intrepid YouTuber made a chicken sandwich truly from scratch—controlling (nearly) all of the inputs. It cost him $1,500 and took six months. The sandwich was … fine. Artist Thomas Thwaites spent nine months working nearly full-time to make a toaster from scratch. It cost about 250 times what a conventional, cheap toaster cost. It was also a pretty crappy toaster. In other words, extreme autarky and self-sufficiency is expensive, inefficient, and impoverishing for individuals—and maybe for nations, too.
