In his 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” free marketeer Leonard Read adopted the persona of a writing utensil eager to recite the branches of its cosmopolitan family tree. Beginning with its origins at a logging site in the Pacific Northwest, the pencil lists the far-flung components of its unassuming physique—including graphite mined in Sri Lanka, clay dug up in Mississippi, wax derived from the candelilla shrub in Mexico, and rapeseed oil produced in Indonesia.
In this exercise, Read was updating Adam Smith, who concluded the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations (1776) by peering behind an ordinary object in his own time—a day laborer’s wool coat—to reveal the numerous parties that had a hand in its production, from shepherds to wool combers to spinners to weavers to fullers, all of whose contributions depend, Smith further observed, on the mediation of carriers and the antecedent labors of toolmakers.
Smith presented such collaborations between merchants and tradesmen—fruitful for so many, though driven only by participants’ self-interest—as an object of wonder, occasioning the normally staid philosopher to break out into exclamation marks (e.g., “how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!”). Read, no less prone to exclamations, sought to renew that wonder by emphasizing not only the breadth of a run-of-the-mill pencil’s genealogy but also the lack of a “master mind” behind it all. Each participant, Read stresses, contributes his or her “infinitesimal bit of know-how” without understanding the others’ techniques. “Not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me,” the pencil proudly declares. For Read, as for Smith, supply chains rank among commercial society’s greatest triumphs. The greater their reach, the more workers and materials pulled into their webs, the better.
Our own century would seem to fulfill the hopes of Smith and Read, and thus give reason to rejoice. Supply chains have become unthinkably extensive and intricate, even as the time between placing an order for almost anything and its arrival on our doorsteps has shrunk to days, even hours or mere minutes.