“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders,” said G.K. Chesterton. Indeed, there are wonders everywhere, if we would only stop and take notice. Even the lowly pencil is a wonder, as Drew Tidwell shows us in his six-minute video I, Pencil: The Movie, which deservedly took home the top Reason Video Prize last week.
Based on Leonard E. Read’s celebrated 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” the animated video breaks the pencil down into its component parts: cedar, graphite, metal, and rubber. It traces the global supply chains required to bring those parts together, process them, and combine them into a reliable, affordable finished product. It stretches back further, to the makers of the tools used at various stages of the process, to the services used by the workers in their daily lives, to the people who grow the food they eat. No single person on a desert island could do everything it takes to make a pencil.
And as much as markets are about competition, this video brings into focus the complex, coordinated cooperation that is involved in creating even the simplest of consumer goods. Even more amazingly, this coordination takes place without any top-down control. In fact, trying to control it from on high would disrupt the spontaneous order that emerges from all the various market players responding to the information contained in price signals. The result would be more expensive, shoddier pencils.
If you haven’t yet, check out Tidwell’s video or give the original essay a read, and add a little shot of wonder to your day.
And as much as markets are about competition, this video brings into focus the complex, coordinated cooperation that is involved in creating even the simplest of consumer goods. Even more amazingly, this coordination takes place without any top-down control. In fact, trying to control it from on high would disrupt the spontaneous order that emerges from all the various market players responding to the information contained in price signals. The result would be more expensive, shoddier pencils.
If you haven’t yet, check out Tidwell’s video or give the original essay a read, and add a little shot of wonder to your day.
