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Power of the Market - The Pencil

LibertyPen · 551.2K views · 2008-08-26 · 2:42

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Overview

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the canonical illustration of decentralized production and global cooperation, often cited well outside economics threads.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2011–2019

Topics

Microeconomics & behavioral economicsBusiness & economics (other)
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milton friedmanpencildecentralizationsupply chainsfree to choose

What people said

ZenoArrow · 2017-07 · Recommendation

> "Do you mean that Boeing is built by independent people who work on whatever they want to and then a plane is assembled of that independently built parts and no one takes the responsibility of the result?" Somewhere in the middle. If you consider the work that goes into making a plane, you'll see quite a bit of it happens outside Boeing. To give one example, think of the aluminium that goes into the plane. Boeing doesn't have to mine bauxite, extract the aluminium from the bauxite, transport it to the place where its sold, etc... A classic example of this ground-up view was this example given by Milton Friedman about the pencil. I don't agree with many of his views, but I think he makes a good point in this video: [VIDEO] EDIT: Turns out the source of this example may have been Leonard Read: [LINK]

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doomjunky · 2019-03 · Reference

Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. [0] [0]: Milton Friedman [VIDEO]

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Namari · 2018-10 · Reference

Maybe but if you reduce the population from whatever group, there is less needs for everything and because everything is related it will an worldwide impact. Watch this video: [VIDEO] and you'll see that all is linked and the more we are the more we will consume this planet.

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Sources

Video by LibertyPen, played through YouTube.

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