I, Pencil
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2021
6:33 · 1.4M views · Nov 14, 2012
A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.
HN recommends it as a quick video version of the classic essay on specialization and economic interdependence.
5 comments from Hacker News
Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: this video (6:33 in total; it’s a bit “dreamy” sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute). Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture, freeing up Human Resources to work on other things. We’ve been perfecting this for a few thousand years, of which we’ve been automating things using software for only 50 years (being generous here). Give it some time - with the current rate of development we may not need another thousand years to improve software development to near perfection as well ;-) (Or more pessimistically: there’s still a lot of hunger in this world so even after a few thousand years we’ve not even perfected the most basic of human needs - doesn’t bode well for something as fancy as the typical glorified beans counter that is most enterprise software...) Disclaimer: This video is typically used as a pro free markets argument to illustrate the level of cooperation required to produce even the simplest things, arguing that such collaboration is only possible by free actors in a free market - that’s not the point here but still interesting tangent to think about in this context.
For those looking for an even shorter read, Leonard Read's I, Pencil gets the basic point across pretty quickly. There's even a video adaptation available for those who don't want to read at all. [LINK] this video
Or, how to make a pencil. this video (not the same guy at all, but your comment reminded me of this. It's really about specialization and the interdependency of everything in the economy)
>>Okay, but presumably a smart government would decide that all jobs involved in the production and transportation of foodstuffs are essential. I know my country's government did. That is the folly of this way of thinking, all jobs are interlinked, you can not just extract jobs from the market and not have an impact. The person that cooks breakfast for the truck driver that picks up the food from the warehouse that stored the food that came from the factory that made the food from ingredients from a farm field is just as "essential" as ever other person in the chain. As is the IT worker that works on a helpdesk for the credit card processor that service the restaurant that truck driver above stops at every morning As the manufacture of the monitor stand that the IT worker uses to hold up their monitor to enable them to service the Restaurant of the truck driver... and on and on we go down the chain.. Look up I, Pencil[1] for a better understanding of this Government just pulling out people they claim are "not essential" to food production or other essential things is foolish because all jobs are essential. Period. non-essential jobs do not exist, and any government claiming there is, and claiming they are smart enough to make that determination should never be trusted with anything. >I haven't seen any evidence that anyone tried to implement Central Planning The very nature of choosing who can work, who cant, what is jobs are essential, what jobs are not is Central planning [
It should remind you of I, Pencil since it is essentially the modern telling of Smith's pin factory. Milton Friedman described the pencil in his Free to Choose series: [LINK] And in 2012 CEI made a movie version: this video I know the rules here are such that we don't talk about voting up/down, but I have no idea why you were voted down. Your post is on-topic and informative. I didn't know their was a book version or the CEI movie version, I had only watched the Free to Choose series. Thanks for sharing.