It takes a lot of people to manufacture even the simplest products, so making a household appliance on your own shouldn’t be expected to be easy. It may even be impossible. That’s what the artist Thomas Thwaites is finding as he tries to make a toaster from scratch, traveling around the world to collect raw materials and refining his own petroleum for plastic moldings. Aware that he still won’t be able to accomplish his task without the help of modern appliances, like a microwave, Thwaites claims his experiment points to the “helplessness” of the modern consumer. At Reason Online, meanwhile, Radley Balko argues that our inability to make a toaster doesn’t mean we’re helpless at all, but rather that we’ve been liberated by free markets. (This is hardly a new argument; consider the pencil, and similar tales.) [%comments]
It Takes a Free Market to Build a Toaster
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The problem is he’s trying to make a toaster based on industrial design. He should have looked at the basic principles and figured out that all he needed was a heating coil, thermostat, and bread holder. Any machinist will tell you, if you’re going to make one of something, you would make it much differently than if you’re going to make 1000 of it.
He could without a doubt toast bread using materials found in most yards in no time at all. Also if he’s already okay with using a hair dryer or microwave to transform the materials, he might as well just toast bread with his iron, oven, or maybe even the hairdryer.
The toaster is too complex – think electricity needed to make it run etc. Plus as many have mentioned – the toaster is convenience, not necessity for burning your bread.
A more interesting example of us losing general knowledge could be seen in this review (http://www.wired.com/geekdad/tag/little-house-on-the-prarie/) of Little House on Prairie (book not show) and how Pa Ingles had to build his house from what he found on the land, without nails, mortar, etc.
Most of us lack the knowledge because it’s easier and cheaper to run to Home Depot/hire someone else.
Here here K @#1 and Jake@#3. When making a toaster becomes more difficult than making toast, just make toast!
wheat+rock = flour
flour+water=dough
wood+spark=fire
dough+fire=bread
bread+fire=toast
Without a knife, I guess you couldn’t technically have a slice, more like a chunk?
So, if we traded places with one of our ancestors, we couldn’t survive. And if thye trade places with us, they couldn’t survive.
Isn’t this the plot of 50% of the live action Disney movies ever made?
What does he need plastic for? You can make an electric toaster, which I assume is what he’s shooting for, without plastic. He’ll have enough fun forming the metal and extruding wire to bother with stuff he *doesn’t* need.
“…and refining his own petroleum for plastic moldings.”
Boy, there’s a cheat. He should be crushing his own dinosaurs miles beneath the earth’s crust.
Oh, the stark ideology in the concluding statement:
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand.
How about a parallel disertation on all the government activity needed to make that pencil. The roads. The schools. Oh, you get the idea. People love their mythology, in this case, the myth of the invisible hand.
I don’t think it necessarily takes a _free_ market (communists make toasters too), but markets certainly have helped push us upward on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.