I, Toaster

http://www.reason.com/news/show/134322.html

by tptacek • 17 years ago

119 51 17 years ago

tokenadult• 17 years ago

"It's a peculiar kind of "helplessness" that enables us to benefit from the shared labor of millions of workers and the collected knowledge of millions of people accumulated over hundreds of years by merely traveling to the nearest Wal-Mart or appliance store, or, better yet, by merely clicking the mouse on a computer a few times and having the toaster (or, for that matter, groceries, or clothing, or medicine) brought directly to our homes.

"And where Read expressed awe at the way so many people worked together--motivated only by self-interest--to produce not only pencils, but millions of other products that make our lives better, Thwaites oddly sees waste:"

Good find. There is still a lot of misunderstanding of economics in a lot of posts here, so this article "delights the mind" for many HN readers.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

To play Devils' advoate (although I think this is an excellent essay) I think the point of the toaster project was to question the amount of effort that goes into producing cheap toasters, which are of relatively narrow utility. There's a lot you can do with a pencil, as with any general purpose tool: the production of pencils (or keyboards, or CPUs) is an example of capitalism at its finest.

A toaster, on the other hand, sacrifices flexibility for efficiency. It's faster and uses less energy than opening up your stove and making toast on the broiler (a Good Thing), but that's all you can do with it - toast bread products. If you want to have egg with your toast, it's no help at all (unlike your stove, which allows you to cook things in many different ways). If you follow the toaster approach, you end up with a kitchen full of one-purpose appliances which are individually excellent but ultimately cater to peoples' inability to cook. At some point it's worth asking the question of whether having multiple specialized appliances is really more efficient than having one or two that can be turned to many different ones. If you look in the kitchen of a diner or restaurant, there are relatively few fancy appliances but the cooks really know what they're doing.

There's room for both approaches. Programming everything from scratch without libraries would be terribly wasteful. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't respect a programmer who relied solely on library functions and was unable to derive any algorithms of their own, no?

dk• 17 years ago

Are you saying this is just an exalted critique of unitaskers (a la Alton Brown)? It seems to me there's more going on here:

"Perhaps the majority of human activity can be reduced to a desire to make life more comfortable for ourselves, and has thus far led to being able to buy a toaster for £3.99 [among other achievements]. But looking at toasters in relation to global industry, at a moment in time when the effects of our industry are no longer trivial compared to the insignificant when our, they seem unreasonable. I think our position is ambiguous - the scale of industry involved in making a toaster [etc.] is ridiculous but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable."

As if "global industry" exists only to create "toasters [etc.]". In agreement with the essay, I think there's a whole lot of context that's being dropped by focusing on a device with relatively narrow purpose.

radu_floricica4• 17 years ago

That's also solved by the collective intelligence. Is it better to have simple devices which do only one thing each, or something big which does all, or something simple which can do a lot of things but with more labor? The market has tried all (or a lot of) choices, and the winner is still the toaster.

crux• 17 years ago

Good find nothing. The very passage that Balko quotes from Thwaites contradicts his assessment. It's not just uncharitable but slightly fantastical. Thwaites says:

"Commercial extraction and processing of the necessary materials happens on a scale that is difficult to resolve into the humble toaster. This contrast in scale is a bit absurd—massive industrial activity devoted to making objects which enable us, the consumer, to toast bread more efficiently. However, this ridiculousness dissipates somewhat when you consider that life pre-toasters required stoking the fire when a piece of toast was desired."

Where does he speak of 'waste' here? He speaks of absurdity, to be sure, but only the most steely-minded libertarian, who has diligently eliminated any trace of aesthetic sentiment from his mind in favor of cold market-based reason, could fail to acknowledge that the notion of the great powers of the earth, bringing all their force to bear on the basic stuff of nature, digging and tearing down mountains, all leading to a single $8 toaster, is more or less as absurd as it gets. To point out that NO, STUPID, it's not a single toaster, it's a million toasters! And insulin, too! What are you, some kind of Commie? Is what I would characterize as churlish. And certainly uninteresting. Indeed, even in the middle of considering the absurdity of the toaster Thwaites follows his train of thought to allow for the real value of convenience, as provided by consumer technology.

And again, who would deny that there is a component of helplessness when we can't even toast bread without buying a toaster from a supermarket? Thwaites doesn't sound like an ideologue, he sounds like an artist, whose job it is to consider an issue from new perspectives, and hopefully to cast light on all its components. Balko, on the other hand, is clearly an inveterate ideologue, who misreads ambivalence and curiosity as doubt and its never-far companion, condemnation. I'd rather watch somebody try to build his own toaster than read this kind of boosterism, which thinks it detects a threat to its beloved system and tries to drown out nuance or even-handedness.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

You know, I'm not sure "I, Toaster" is a more accurate summary of this article, since the article is in fact a critique of "I, Toaster".

Radix• 17 years ago

I think it is. "I, Toaster" is a play off of "I, Pencil" attempting to show how the truth is, our positions in society are tenuous and because we have become unlikely to be capable of fending for ourselves, we are helpless.

This article, "I, Toaster", turns it back around and places the art piece parallel in meaning to "I, Pencil".

[There, fewer words.]

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Whoah, you're right, I'm wrong --- I misread the first graf of the article, and thought "The Toaster Project" was actually called "I, Toaster".

rationalbeaver• 17 years ago

I remember when I first read "I, Pencil" after hearing a lecture on it. It really presents an incredible way to look at the world which has stuck with me ever since.

jordanf• 17 years ago

Here is Read's "I, Pencil": http://www.scribd.com/doc/11603927/IPencil

kqr2• 17 years ago

Or scribd free:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

zzzmarcus• 17 years ago

http://www.commonsenseeconomics.com/Readings/I.Pencil2006.FE...

There's a link to the downloadable PDF (it's disabled on Scribd) for the pack rats.

kiba4• 17 years ago

Hmm. Somebody wrote your text editor.

Another wrote your kernels, plus an army of programmer.

Some guy halfway around the world wrote the Ruby intrepreter more than a decade ago.

Another wrote your build tools.

Several indiviuals wrote several different package management tools and you use it all. (apt-get, rubygem...)

Somebody wrote your browser and someone invent the language in which Hacker News was written in.

Yeah, even as hackers, we are all "helpless" and that's a good thing. It mean we can focus on writing new software instead of reinventing the wheel.

yread• 17 years ago

Yeah but especially on open source platform you could argue that most of the software stack wasnt created because of capitalism, people who made it had different motivation than money. If everybody in Soviet union acted as open source programmers ...

eru2• 17 years ago

> If everybody in Soviet union acted as open source programmers ...

... then they would have more efficient Gulags?

The most important feature of a market is not money, but decentral decision making and feedback. Also freedom from tort plays a part.

All things that the Soviet Union surely lacked. (And they did have money. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble)

Maktab• 17 years ago

But what is capitalism if not the freedom of people to freely trade the goods that they acquire or create for other goods that they value more? There's nothing that says that it has to explicitly be money that is traded; it could be something as amorphous as trading your time and effort in return for public recognition and acclaim.

As software developers, the software stacks we use are a great example of the decentralised 'invisible hand' aspect of markets. Nobody planned the transition from Assembler to C to Java to Python (etc), there's no panel of experts deciding that we're all going to start programming in X language from next year or some government department building the One True Language/Framework/OS. The fact that most of what we use is free is largely irrelevant, because time and effort are not free and all trade is about each party's perception of relative, not absolute, value.

mikesabat• 17 years ago

'If the world could remain in a single frame, like a painting on the wall.. I think we'd see the beauty then, and stand staring in awe'

calcnerd256• 17 years ago

At the end, the author talks about the free market versus central planning and how the emergent, chaotic nature demonstrated in I, Pencil renders futile any efforts to manage. It seems like a bit of a fallacy, though, to say that because it didn't work in the past, it's been proven hopeless. Soviets didn't have the Web, for instance. Still, it is good not to underestimate the self-organizing intricacy of the ad-hoc situation we have, especially for people who think it's simple to replace with a managed solution without all the information.

kiba4• 17 years ago

It is highly doubtful that central planners can in fact gather all the necessary information much less being able to understand and decide what and how to allocate resource in a way that satisfy the population best.(Let say that central planner's goal is to satisfy the population to the most extent possible)

More over, since the population do not have the same taste, wants, or preferences the central planner must cater to all tastes. Since even group with the same preferences are made of individuals, the central planner must also produce enough to satisfy all the needs.

He must balance all parties' conflicting needs and wants and must decide what to produce and not to produce since the end that there are only so much resources to go around.

Pretty tall order isn't it?

ubernostrum4• 17 years ago

Really?

I hate to break it to the author of this piece, but toasters and pencils do not magically spring fully-formed from the uncoordinated, joyful, dignified labor of confident Ayn Rand heroes.

A company decides to get into the toaster business. That company then deals with coordinating everything needed to bring the pieces together and put toasters on the market. That company places orders with others which provide raw materials. That company builds or acquires factories and machinery. That company gets workers to build toasters, probably on an assembly line. That company sets up distribution channels.

In other words, the toaster company has to -- gasp! -- engage in centralized planning of how toasters will be produced, distributed and sold. Fortunately, centralized planning and coordination is only doomed to fail when the government does it, right?

And the odds are that most of the people in the chain are not working with much joy or dignity, especially the closer you get to the manufacturing and raw materials. They most likely work not because they find their life's purpose in mining the ore that furthers the wonder of captalism, but because mining the ore is about the only option in whatever place they had the misfortune to be born into.

Of course, when you put it like this it's not a juvenile libertarian's wet dream anymore, and Reason wouldn't want to publish anything like that. But ideology and reality don't often match up (and, to be honest, I've no doubt that if the author of this piece had been born in Stalin's Soviet Union, he'd have used similar logic to extol the wonders of the Glorious People's Ore-Mining Facilities, which bring raw materials from far-flung places to produce the Toaster of the Motherland, in a striking blow to the decadent imperialist capitalist pig-dogs).

kiba4• 17 years ago

Who say that they are getting much joy or dignity or that they're doing it to further the wonder of capitalism or whatever strawman you made up?

The difference between a government's central planning and the company is that the company have to trade something to get anything done.

While the company may in fact central plan part of their operation, the fact is, the bricks must be traded for something else. The steel, the workers, and everything have to also occur by trade.

This is something that cannot happen by mere "central planning". Each individuals, must decide what will benefit them the most. After all, they could go do something else in the economy that need urgent attention.

ubernostrum4• 17 years ago

"Who say that they are getting much joy or dignity or that they're doing it to further the wonder of capitalism or whatever strawman you made up?"

Here's a direct quote from the article:

"From the miners to the factory workers to the truck drivers to the smelters to the architects of the factories to the executives that run the companies that fund and organize each step of the process, each and every participant is in the game for his own self interest—to make a living, and to make a contribution that's really only a tiny part of the end result of a product, even one as insignificant as the humble pencil. Pan back until you've framed the entire world economy, and it's hard not to marvel at the wonder and miracle of capitalism's invisible hand."

You want to tell me I'm making stuff up now?

"The difference between a government's central planning and the company is that the company have to trade something to get anything done."

"While the company may in fact central plan part of their operation, the fact is, the bricks must be traded for something else. The steel, the workers, and everything have to also occur by trade."

"This is something that cannot happen by mere "central planning". Each individuals, must decide what will benefit them the most. After all, they could go do something else in the economy that need urgent attention."

OK, you tell me: if you're the guy who lives in a slum in Bolivia and works for slave wage in a tin mine, to what other aspect of the economy can you devote your urgent attention? And, with the lowest GDP on the continent, what are you, your employer or your country getting in return for that resource to make it a worthwhile trade?

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

I think you're missing something very important when you talk about the centralized planning in companies:

Failure.

A toaster company doesn't have to get it all right in order for toasters to be produced. It merely has to come close enough that someone else realizes that a toaster is a good idea, tweaks some features, and does it better. Eventually we end up with a working toaster, even if 99.9% of toaster companies didn't produce a working toaster.

It also helps that the toaster company can rely on the metal-casing company already have gotten most of that right, and the heating-element company having gotten most of that right, and the timer coming having gotten most of that right. It doesn't have to start from scratch for every component of the toaster, only the toaster-ish ones.

The difference between governments and corporations is that corporations can fail. When they can't (eg. Citigroup, GM, and AIG in the current financial crisis), central planning in a corporation is every bit as harmful as central planning in the government. But most of the time, when a corporation fails, other people pick up the pieces, tweak them a bit, and try again with a newer and better corporation. Hell, most of the time the newer and better corporation comes along first and makes the outdated one fail. (See: Toyota vs. GM, Google vs. Microsoft, Microsoft vs. IBM, etc.)

When a government fails, usually lots of people die. At the very minimum, there's lots of misery and uncertainty.

You could argue that one of the greatest things about the U.S. government is its ability to tolerate failure without bringing down the whole government. When a president royally screws things up, like the last one did, he's out in eight years, there's a peaceful transition, and someone new picks up the pieces. Could you imagine something like that happening in Castro's Cuba, Saddam's Iraq, or Communist Russia? For most of history, the modus operandi of governments has been to continue growing in power until they're so big they can't do anything but fail, then have a bloody revolution where the new radicals throw out everything the old guard did - even the parts that worked - and start from scratch. It's hard to make progres like that.

eru2• 17 years ago

I agree. Though I doubt that the modus operandi you described was prevalent. For most of histories external power struggles (including war) served a check on inefficencies of governments.

sethg2• 17 years ago

The line between "corporation" and "government" is not always so bright.

For example, in 1987 GE sold its consumer electronics division to Thompson SA, which was owned by the French government.

sethg2• 17 years ago

For most of history, the modus operandi of governments has been to continue growing in power until they're so big they can't do anything but fail, then have a bloody revolution where the new radicals throw out everything the old guard did - even the parts that worked - and start from scratch.

To be fair, a lot of pre-democratic government structures weren't that bad at handling power transition. Either there was a generally-acknowledged official line of succession, or some kind of council of noblemen who were officially responsible for choosing the king's successor, or some combination of the two. Of course, kings back then also had more practical (if not constitutional) limitations on their power than Saddam had on his power.

davidw2• 17 years ago

A few random notes:

* The ideal size of corporations is an interesting subject. If central planning is so bad, why are some companies so huge? Why do companies get big if small is better? Why aren't we all just individual contractors, rather than employees?

* Free trade is generally seen as 'good' by economists, but a move in that direction may not be a Pareto improvement; i.e. while everyone is generally better off, there may be some people made (significantly) worse off. Technology improvements are the same way: people may be better off using computers than typewriters, but not typewriter repairmen. One strategy to mitigate the worst effects of this would be a bit of redistribution from all the winners, to the losers. Everyone is thus better off than before the move to free trade, or new tech, and the losers have some cushion to fall back on. Of course this presents problems of its own and is a long and complicated debate.

Nwallins• 17 years ago

> Could you imagine something like that happening in Castro's Cuba, Saddam's Iraq, or Communist Russia?

Also, Zimbabwe.

lief79• 17 years ago

sigh ... the president really failed, yet it still took and extra four years to get rid of him.

Of course, we're still doing better then Iran.

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

Actually, the toaster company only engages in central planning of toaster assembly. They plan almost nothing else.

Where do they get their iron from? Commodities markets. If I'm not mistaken, even the name of the seller is abstracted away from them (by the financial services industry, which is also not planned by the toaster company).

The manufactured parts (e.g. the plug and switched) may actually require them to care who they purchase from, but all the planning is done by someone else.

And the distribution channels are also, for the most part, handled by someone else. The company sends toasters to Walmart by the truckload, distribution is up to walmart from there on. Maybe the company sends some advertising materials, but that's about it.

The toaster company does engage in planning, but only a little bit. The rest is left up to the markets.

colomon• 17 years ago

More precisely, everyone at every stage of the thing engages in planning. And those plans are coordinated almost entirely by the market. That's the point of the original article.

anamax2• 17 years ago

> In other words, the toaster company has to -- gasp! -- engage in centralized planning of how toasters will be produced, distributed and sold. Fortunately, centralized planning and coordination is only doomed to fail when the government does it, right?

One difference is that when govt does "it", govt typically forbids or at least seriously punishes alternatives. At the very least, govt takes resources from folks who would do things differently.

If I have no interest in your toaster idea, I'm free to develop an alternative and I don't end up supporting your idea. When govt develops a toaster, I pay for it even if I think that it's dumb, and govt is likely to place restrictions on my alternative.

Govt solutions are also less diverse. This takes two forms.

Each company will take a somewhat different approach to toasters while govts pick an approach and run with it. Since each attempt has roughly the same odds of success, taking multiple shots tends to produce a better "best" result.

It's also the case that one size doesn't fit all. Different companies end up optimizing their product for different users, increasing overall satisfaction. If there's only one product in a given space, as you get with govt solutions, said product ends up not satisfying a significant fraction of people and it has "flexibility" that gets in the way.

Folks rant about monopolies, but govt is the biggest monopoly of all.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

Pet peeve:

"As for "pre-toaster" lives, most people who lived in the age before the toaster could expect to die by about age 40 (the toaster was invented in 1893, when life expectancy in the U.S. was about 43 years)."

I hate when people talk about how people in the last century could expect to die when they were about 40, because that is skewed by the ridiculously high infant-mortality rates. The data that that paragraph links to says it all: if you lived to age 10 by 1900, you could expect to live another 50 years more, i.e. you would most likely die when you were about 60.

Take a good look at the data. At birth in 1890, your life expectancy was only 42 years. At 10 years old in 1900, your life expectancy is now 50 more years, i.e. you've aged 10 years but now you can expect to live an additional 8 years on top of that. Your total life expectancy went up by 18 years just by virtue of having made it through the first 10 years.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, this means about 1/3 of babies died before age 10, which seems about right...

fluffster• 17 years ago

Very good point.

Your total life expectancy went up by 18 years just by virtue of having made it through the first 10 years.

Aubrey de Grey makes the same point in talking about extending life further in this talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can...

lee• 17 years ago

In some cases, centralized planning is the better choice over the alternative. Would the toaster company survive without roads, laws, and a stable currency.

Something do not scale well without central planning.

I, Toaster

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