Last updated on January 12, 2011
Milton Friedman once said that no one in the world knew how to make a pencil from scratch. He said that in order to illustrate the power of the market at decentralizing the hundreds if not thousands of tasks necessary to make something as simple as a pencil.
Designer Thomas Thwaites decided to build a toaster from scratch, learning the lesson of the pencil the hard way. Here is his TED talk on the topic:
(H/T: Chris Blattman via Twitter.)
[…] why people cook less than they used to is the same as the reason why we don’t build our own toasters. It goes back to Adam Smith’s pin factory in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations: […]