The Importance of I, Pencil

Finally, to wrap up this series, I'd like to show a video which essentially ties it all together. When you think about a pencil, it is as low-tech as one can get. And yet, no ONE person could make a pencil. The I Pencil movie shows how inexorably linked we are to one another all over the globe.

One of the ideas that got to me the the number of people required for any one of us to eat a ham sandwich. You need a farmer,  financial people for the farmer to be able to buy his farm and equipment, people to build tractors, the farmer needs to plant, water, fertilize the wheat, keep it healthy and pest free. He must harvest it, thresh it, pack it and have it transported to the mill. There people will grind it into flour, pack it and ship it to bakeries where other people will use even more equipment and ingredients gathered from other places (salt, water, etc.) to bake the bread and then ship it to the supermarket, where someone is required to stock the shelves and someone else to sell it to you...and that's just and extremely simplified story about the bread...We haven't even got to the ham yet! What? You want cheese on that???

And all of this happens routinely every day without a moment's thought! My deepest thanks to Leonard Read for his profound insight over 50 years ago.

"No person knows enough to be able to control our lives." --Walter Williams

Or as F. A. Hayek put it, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Trade & Specialization

This topic, in my opinion, is very closely related to connectivity. We may think of it as countries trading goods and services, but that's just a product of our truly amazing brains being able to abstract highly complex issues without a second thought! 

You see, countries can't trade with each other, because they have no hands! For that reason, they also cannot build or manufacture things or provide services. ONLY PEOPLE can do those things. 

So when we by Japanese cars, for instance, our country is not buying from Japan. The people in our country are buying a product manufactured and sold by Japanese people. Because it is difficult to think of the individuals going to work in specific factories, first we group things by make or brand, then we group makes and brands by countries. 

The problem is that when we talk about it in those abstract terms, we lose sight of the fact that it is one or more individuals connecting to one or more individuals to buy something they have made because it is cheaper or better or simply because we like it more.

At the end of the day, buying, selling and trading are really about people! It's all about people serving other people in order to be able to fulfill their own aspirations! What could be more beautiful and life affirming than that?

CON---NECTIVITY

An idea that I have been talking a lot about with my students is individualism. There are a number of misconceptions surrounding this term. To my mind, in individualism, the individual is NOT the end, but rather the beginning. The end is what individuals can do when they come together through voluntary interaction, each one contributing his unique gifts and talents to create something greater than the sum of the parts.

It is not about being self-absorbed and self-indulgent but quite the contrary; it is about fulfilling the imperative to be the best individual one can possibly be. I've often said this the obligation we have to ourselves. That doesn't mean we all have to be rocket scientists who perform brain surgery on the side...unless that's what YOU desire! It just means that we should strive to live a life that will leave us satisfied with ourselves when our inevitable end comes! In other words to lead a life worth living as defined by the person living that life.

Many fear that individualism will lead to atomism, but I think that fear is unfounded because even atoms only very rarely exist alone. They come together through mutual attraction to form molecules which benefit both atoms by sharing their outermost electrons.

These molecules then are greater than anyone of the single atoms. Take water, for example, 2 hydrogen atoms get together with an oxygen atom and form water...none of them could do that on their own...and none are "forced" to come together either. The hydrogen atoms could (and do) bond with other atoms as does oxygen which even forms bonds with other oxygen atoms, but to make water...

For me, that is what connectivity is all about. Check out the video and see for yourself!

DCERSETARTUICVTEION ??? ----> CREATIVE DESTRUCTION!

Some people seek to destroy for the sake of destruction. We see it all the time in acts of wanton vandalism. This impulse has always escaped me...I cannot begin to comprehend it because I love CONstruction not DEstruction!

Nevertheless, there is a time and a place to destroy...not for it's own sake, but rather in order to create something else. Perhaps, this notion is not so antithetical to me because what tends to happen is not so much that something is destroyed in order to create something else, but rather the creation of the new thing causes the destruction of the old.

To take an example from the video below. It was not that the horse and buggy were destroyed as a means of transport so that cars could replace them, but rather it was the creation of automobiles that signaled the end of the horse and buggy. I suppose that's why it's called "creative destruction" and not "destructive creation!"

I must also admit that the whole idea is also not nearly as smooth as it sounds. There are costs involved and some people bear those costs more heavily and directly than others. So, when the automobile came along blacksmiths and other people involved with breeding and keeping horses suffered, carpenters, leather workers and others whose life work was making and maintaining buggies did too.

We live in a time of constant and accelerating change and that is very unsettling for people. But we can't really fight this reality, so perhaps it is best to accept it and adapt as best we can.

This reminds me of a question which came up the other day. Are we superior to primitive men? My answer is no! We may have superior tools and greater understanding of the physical world, but we are JUST LIKE primitive men. We, like them, are doing the best we can with what we have and what we know! And that is the best we can hope for!

Enjoy the video!

.......SPONTANEOUS drero----> ORDER!

The first follow up video to the I Pencil movie is about ORDER. Where does order come from? Yes, order can come from the top down, such as when a ruler, a boss or some authority tells you what to do, when and where. However, absent such an authority, order seems to emerge spontaneously!

We've all witnessed this, if we've ever been at a crowded fair or carnival. People are wandering around apparently ad hoc. However, despite the occasional gentle bumps into each other, people rarely crash hard into one another! They seem to spontaneously get "in line" and head in the same general direction WITHOUT a traffic policeman signalling people where to go!

Sure, it's not as orderly as a military parade, but it's also not like atoms in a gas or liquid, smashing into each other randomly! It's somewhere in between and, above all, it's good enough!

I don't believe this idea about spontaneous order is limited to human behaviour either. I think it's found at the most profound levels of nature—as when atoms come together spontaneously to form molecules, which come together spontaneously to form proteins, which come together spontaneously to form the basic building blocks of organisms.

In the song How Does a Duck know, 1990s Canadian band, Crash Test Dummies, ask, "How come all my body parts so nicely fit together?" Their conjecture is that "Everything seems planned out...everything seems nicely planned out..." but they neglect to say who plans it out and why! Perhaps, they've stumbled upon the notion that even at the macro level, nature spontaneously provides order!

Finally, my favourite instance of this spontaneous order is offered by economists, Walter Williams and Lawrence Reed, is language itself! No matter what some so-called "orthographic committee," academy, royal or otherwise, or even government might think...and some of these people and institutions really believe that they have some control over language, this control is only inside their precious little heads! People will say what they want, when they want!

Richard Feynman once said that nature doesn't care what you call something, it's going to do what it wants to do! People, being a part of nature, and language being a part of people are pretty much the same!

Do watch the video!

And just in case you missed the Crash Test Dummies song in the 90s...CLICK HERE to watch the video on youtube.

What's in a pencil?

This week my students and I were having our usual rap session about this, that and the other. I'm not sure how this came up, but at one point I told them about what has to be one of my all time favourite videos: I Pencil, based on a 1958 essay by Leonard Read

I will post that video here and then a series of videos with many of the ideas that underpin the I Pencil video.

It's hard to think of anything more low-tech than a pencil. After you've watched the video, I hope it will be hard to think of anything more fascinating!

 

Cambridge Exams

On a more serious note today, the deadline to enroll for the December session of the Cambridge exams is fast approaching. But how important are these exams? I think they're very important for a number of reasons.

Europe is a continent divided by language and culture. English, at least for the moment, seems to be the "inter-language" of the diverse European people. It is one thing to say you can speak a language and quite another to be able to "prove" it, as it were, with a diploma or qualification. Someone without the qualification may even be a better speaker than someone with it...but, as we say in English, the proof is in the pudding.

All of that seems almost too obvious to even bother saying, but it's true and I like to start with the most obvious arguments.

There are other more fundamental reasons to take the exams, however. For one thing, the exams establish a goal for you to achieve. Especially once you reach the "intermediate plateau." Once you reach the intermediate level you can communicate relatively effectively on a wide of topics. You may not feel the need to stretch yourself to reach upper-intermediate or advanced levels. The exams provide an excellent impetus for you to stretch yourself.

That brings me to another good reason to do the exams. More than proving yourself to others, they give you the opportunity to prove yourself TO yourself!

Finally, I feel, from my years of experience in training students to take these exams, that when you prepare for them, your learning reaches deeper more lasting levels. Of course, if you stop using English, you will become rusty. But, if you prepare for the exams, I'm convinced that after a few hours of speaking or after a couple conversation classes, it will come to you faster and clearer than even before. This might actually be a good topic for some applied linguistics research!

Can you say..."post doc?" :)