Why Nobody Knows How to Make a Pencil

Source: James Shelly website, Jun 2015

In 1958, an economist named Leonard Read pointed out that, in fact, no one knows how to make a pencil! A pencil, as simple as it might seem, is really the sum product of a vast range of specialties that are, collectively, more complex than any one person could accomplish:

Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink! (Read, 1958)

Thus the humble pencil, like virtually every human invention, is a testimony to the power of creative collaboration working through the synthesis of diverse disciplines.

There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. (Ibid)

Regardless of how brilliant and indispensable we think we are, everything we will do today is categorically dependent upon thousands of other people. Regardless of how menial and rote we think our job is, everything we will do today intersects this immense web of ingenuity and creation. We are all nodes in the network.

Milton Friedman on the pencil

Related Resource: Econlib essay, first published Dec 1958