I, Pencil: The Movie

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Recommends flyingfences · 2017-03 · on “Most items of clothing have complicated international journeys”

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]

Recommends CWuestefeld · 2020-02 · on “Brown: color is weird [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)

Recommends pieno · 2020-09 · on “On Modern Web Applications Stability”

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 i

Cites eddieh · 2019-12 · on “Adam Smith and the Pin Factory”

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.

Cites syshum · 2021-11 · on “World food prices reach new peak since July 2011”

>>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