Economist LEONARD READ extols free enterprise in the fable ‘I, Pencil’, originally published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. The fable’s narrator is the titular instrument. It informs the reader that, despite its apparent simplicity, innumerable processes must take place for it to come into being. A cursory description is enough to give the reader an idea of the stupefying, unfathomable complexity of its provenance: straight-grain cedar trees in Northern California and Oregon have to be felled; the loggers possess a suite of on-the-job-acquired skills necessary for performing their job; they require special tools and machinery, all with their own intricate origin stories; they have to be fed, refreshed and accommodated in logger camps; the provision of food and refreshments likewise depends on intersecting supply chains and the practical knowledge of the service employees; hauling the logs to the sawmill in San Leandro relies on transportation and communication infrastructure, energy resources and, crucially, the competence of all the individuals involved in the logistical chain; at the sawmill, a multi-step process converts the logs into pencil-length slats; again, machinery, expert operators, and the inputs of people not directly involved in the manufacturing process — the sawmill’s administrative and cleaning personnel and the employees of the electricity provider — are all integral; at the pencil factory, the procurement of graphite and other essential materials is downstream of mining and processing, themselves highly complex processes that rely on both technical and nontechnical forms of expertise. The tracing of this lineage is intended to drive home a central point: there exists no one in the world who possesses the entirety of the knowledge and skill required to make an item as banal as a pencil. It nevertheless gets made because countless people freely exchange goods and services, in pursuit of their own aims, without the direction and supervision of a central planner — a ‘mastermind’. Surmising that this is a thinly disguised critique of socialist economic planning will not be a feat of deductive reasoning. However, Read’s agenda is as epistemic as it is political. He advises readers to resist the tendency to reduce complexity to a coherent narrative involving an omnipotent string-puller. He laments the misguided preference for non-empirical know-what, rather than empirically acquired know-how, expertise. Following FRIEDRICH HAYEK, he urges epistemic humility and suspicion toward grand technocratic schemes cooked up by self-appointed masterminds.1 But ‘I, Pencil’ contains no condescension, no harrowing accounts of, say, Stalin’s crimes to scare the reader straight, no appeal to tribal loyalty, no attempt to beguile the reader with learned displays and abstruse technical jargon. Read’s only weapon is a gentle, disarming matter-of-factness. Not many Cold-War mementos can be expected to date this well.
Hayek’s pertinent ideas were most notably expressed in his celebrated article ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’.