The toaster project was attempt by design student Thomas Thwaites to build a toaster entirely from scratch starting with the raw materials and then making those into parts and then assembling those parts to make the toaster. After nine months, he was unsuccessful in his attempt, the toaster only working for 5 seconds before bursting into flames. This showed how even building something as common and as cheap as the toaster he was trying to replicate takes a lot of complex technology and knowledge. It requires a lot of different materials which means the economy around the business making toasters must be sufficiently rich in order to produce these materials at a low cost. This business at even the most base level would also require things like electricity, a workforce, a legal system, etc. in order for it to thrive and be profitable. This shows how even something that we might think of as simple needs to developed a vast network in order to be successful.
According to Barder, over the past 50 years economic models have not been very successful. The Harrod-Domar model was a popular model of growth after the second world war, which states that to make a unit of output you need to combine a certain amount of capital and a certain amount of labor, and therefore to increase your output you only have to increase capital and labor and that the same goes for an economy as a whole. However, as Barder puts it, “this model bares no resemblance to reality.” He then talks about the Solow model, which took the Harrod-Domar model and added an undefined variable of technical change. Although it fit the data much better than the Harrod-Domar, this newer model wasn’t really a model at all and gives this unexplained technical change as the main reason why some countries are rich and some countries are poor. But this isn’t very logical. Knowledge is much cheaper to obtain than labor or capital and can be used by anyone so why wouldn’t technology spread? While technological change might be a factor, it doesn’t make much sense for it to be the main difference between rich and poor countries.
Steve Jones was a leading evolutionary scientist. Jones was brought in at uni-lever to make a more efficient nozzle, which was a key part in the soap powder making process. He was very successful, making the nozzle hundreds of times more efficient than it was before. To make such advancement, Jones started out with the original model then distorted in it 10 different ways and tested which one worked the best. Then he took that most efficient version and distorted it 10 times and looked for which one of those worked the best. He continued this process all the way through to the 45th generation. His results were significant because the nozzle he created could never had been imagined, and in fact it is still not understood why it works so much better than the original. This show how adaptive change truly is the best and most effective way to develop.
Haile Sellasie was the last emperor of the great feudal dynasty of Ethiopia. Kapuscinski’s The Emporer depicts the lavish everyday living of Sellasie. How all decisions and all questions came from him, and how it was dangerous to tell him about the problems of his people. Kapuscinski illustrates the logic behind regimes like this one and those in Iran and Angola. Ethiopia was “stuck in a poverty trap”, run by wealthy people who benefitted from the economic structure as it was and did everything in their power to keep it that way. By preventing any evolution or adaptation, these powerful elites have kept the country frozen in their current stage of development, unable to progress. Sen would have described this suppression as a suppression against development and therefore a suppression against freedom. I do agree, that to halt human being’s natural inclination to adapt and evolve, to better the things around them, is to take away their right to make the most out of their lives. It strips people of being able to live up to their potential without them even knowing. I believe being able to try as hard as you want to make your life as good as you want it should be a freedom that every human being on earth should have.