Evolution of producer and consumer goods

Miscellaneous General
1

I had this thought recently and was wondering if anybody’s run across this before. Think of Leonard Read’s famous essay I, Pencil. Now, rather than thinking of this as just a narrative of an individual pencil to teach a lesson, think of applying this pedigree process to all goods. Think of all the pieces that went into every pencil and, every cell phone, every car, etc. Now, think of all the pieces that went into producing those goods and into producing the capital goods that produced those goods, and so on.

You can think of this as a kind of “genealogical tree” stretching back logically and temporally. Read’s essay traces back the pedigree of a single good, mostly logically. But think about not just an individual good, such as a pencil, but entire classes of good, such as pencils-as-such. That is, think of the pedigree of new technologies (including new technological and social processes) stretching back in time. It was not possible to build a skyscraper until the invention of steel which is a class of good which is technologically superior in hardness and durability - and economical - to all the metals which had preceded it.

We can think of this process not as metaphorically evolutionary but actually evolutionary. Imagine an exact copy of Earth as it was 10,000 years ago and imagine that the 1,000,000 smartest and most knowledgeable people in all areas of science and industry were magically transported onto this alternate Earth, complete with all the information that is available today… all books (even historical ones), all the data of the Internet (but not the computers, just the data). How long would it take these people to reconstruct society as it is today? The answer is that it would take a very long time. It might not take 10,000 years but it would take multiple human generations because - despite their superior technological knowledge to our forebears who blindly explored the technological landscape until they hit on the right ideas, they would not be able to take as many shortcuts as you might think. Many of the machines of the 1800s that built the machines of the 1900s would have to be rebuilt on the way to rebuilding the technology of the 2000s, and so on.

You can see how we’ve built this interconnected, incomprehensibly complex machine (the human economy) up from dirt, stone, animals and iron ore and then “burnt our bridges” to the past. This way of thinking about producer and consumer goods as if they were living creatures that emerged from a long process of blind evolution consisting of specific pedigrees which cannot be reconstructed at will may help some leftists who understand the essence of evolutionary theory but struggle with free markets to understand the truly evolutionary nature of free markets.

Clayton -

2

Excellent post. You are asking us to imagine what if China, after having its capital destroyed by the state, tried to rebuild without foreign capital. You also explain why “investment in education” and more “scientists and engineers” are not the answers to “getting the economy back on track,” “rebuilding America,” etc. Capital must be built and saved and is needed in other areas before we can all have an iPhone 5 or an iPad with retina screen. But the state will make those “investments” and, thereby, will not let the market proceed, thus creating another tech bubble; meanwhile, other secters of the economy will be neglected.

3

How long would it take these people to reconstruct society as it is today?

You mean technology? Because they can’t reconstruct society, and if they were to try, it would be disastrous, as is any human engineering.

4

And so eventually we will forget that it is a machine, and that it was we who built it to serve us…

And so it will become our God. AMen.

5

You have the exact right idea, Clayton, especially about how to attract leftists and environmentalists. The same methods that are used in EvPsych can be used in economics, and vice versa. One of my very first posts was addressing this question from the reverse end: Aren’t fruit trees (genes) actually just like capitalists? It’s just an example, because fruit trees have obvious symbiotic relationships with animals. They provide services (health, satiation) much like Google does with Adsense. They compete in the marketplace and develop their technologies to extreme degrees, taking entrepreneurial risks and making profits or taking losses.