

I, Toaster - tptacek
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134322.html

======
nostrademons
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
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...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html)

------
tokenadult
"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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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?

~~~
radu_floricica
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.

~~~
DannoHung
I like toaster ovens, personally.

It's really got nothing to do with the versatility and more to do with the
size of the heating elements and the space required.

------
ubernostrum
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).

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
davidw
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.

~~~
kragen
_The ideal size of corporations is an interesting subject_

ObCoase.

~~~
davidw
Yeah, he's the famous one.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase>

I don't know what else has been done in that field. Any pointers?

~~~
kragen
I don't know either, although that hasn't stopped me from opining about it on
kragen-tol from time to time.

------
kiba
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
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 ...

~~~
Maktab
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.

------
rationalbeaver
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.

------
calcnerd256
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.

~~~
kiba
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?

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

~~~
kqr2
Or scribd free:

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

------
mikesabat
'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'

------
tptacek
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
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.]

~~~
tptacek
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".

------
lee
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.

