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I, Sandwich
Surely all Ricochetois have read (or at least heard of) I, Pencil, Leonard Reed’s 1958 fable about the necessity of trade and how nobody could actually create a pencil on their own from scratch. If not, read it now at the above link.
Well, Reed was a lightweight. He merely talked about this principle. He never actually tried to make a pencil from scratch, all by himself. YouTuber Andy George puts Reed to shame. No, he didn’t try to make a pencil from scratch. He set out to make a simple chicken sandwich from scratch.
It took him 6 months and $1,500 to pull it off, and after all that the end product wasn’t even really that great a sandwich (“Six months of my life for not bad.”):
Also, even after six months and $1,500, he still had to cheat a little a lot. He didn’t raise the chicken himself, for example, though he did kill it.
In that case, he starts by making a flint axe, which he uses to cut down some wood, which he makes into charcoal, which he uses to smelt iron ore (which he gets from a mine in Minnesota) in a bloomery (which he makes out of clay), which he will then make into a hammer (that episode coming soon).
In history (or a realistic scenario for something like this) you’ll have many generations of tools, each used to produce the next set. If you trace backwards through that, you start with your first set of tools; a rock and a stick.
Making vinegar will take about two months. Growing the wheat – about 4-5 months. Raising the chicken will be around 9-12 weeks (a lot depends on which breed you have). I have no idea about bees for honey. Salt would be a pain here in Iowa.
My great grandfather ran a mill. It was a grist mill in season and a sawmill the rest of the year. He made enough coin to send my grandmother off to high school. Since town was about 25 miles away, that included room and board. Water mills have been around for about 2000 years or so, so flour shouldn’t have been tough to get without grinding it yourself.
EDIT: You might be able to make vinegar faster than that. I’m going by how long my grandma took to make it.
I, Grape Nuts would be easy, provided you had some kidney stones to pass.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” ~ Carl Sagan
So it is with sandwiches.
We buy Scratch by the barrel at Sam’s.
Really cool experiment, the implications vital. Civilization depends on specialization and trade and the wider the trade network the greater the flourishing. The rules, mores, attitudes toward outsiders, practices, norms morals necessary to foster trade are integral to human flourishing. The cultural accumulations that foster trade grow from the ground up over centuries, are passed on by families, religious teachers etc. So the best market is the whole world and the best public/collective good, the cultural norms that glue it all together must be as close to the people, personal and cumulative as possible. People hostile to markets, traditional morals and religion and families (they always go together don’t they?) and who want to create culture spanking new from in the heads of our betters and spread from the top down are out to destroy us. And when we let them take power they inevitably do. That is why Hayek called the latter the fatal conceit and in other places the road to serfdom.
Ryan M:
I think there was a lot more inter-tribal trading among the American Indians than most people appreciate.
@Mistheocracy: yes, I agree with what you’ve said. Pointing out the tools, airplane, etc… Doesn’t minimize the achievement, I think it actually strengthens your point and especially the point about market complexity (the crux of i-pencil).
@dime: I’m not sure what your point is. Yes, things can be done entirely on your own. Ever seen the show “survivorman?” Of course it’s possible. The point is quality of life… Not that we couldn’t write without a pencil or that we couldn’t make one, but how vastly our lives are improved by the unseen and underappreciated forces at work within the free market system.
My point is it seems a little contrived to set up a totally from scratch experiment. It is fun and interesting but what does it really tell us. Does it say something about free markets or just that trade is important? Trade can and has been oppressive at times but things got done.
what is the purpose of i-pencil? it is to illustrate a point. All lectures are somewhat contrived. that is how people learn. visualization is good.
It all comes down to degree. I thought the point of I, Pencil was how all the things from distant places need to come together. I, Lunch seems different to me since more people have provided their own food than a graphite writing implement.
Turns out he didn’t make any vinegar. Apparently the cucumbers contain enough lactic acid on their own that you don’t need to use vinegar to pickle ’em. Saltwater brine is enough.
Doesn’t that better make the point? Something we take for granted, that is a necessity, is produced so well by the market that we are left unaware of how much work is involved. Even in the past in agricultural communities where trade was minimal, few people were self-sufficient. Farms were run by families with labor divided up among the members.
Guess my comment about Grape Nuts wasn’t as funny as I thought it was.