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> Chopping the wood, mining the graphite, drilling for the oil used to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser, you think the time and effort for all that amou

> Chopping the wood, mining the graphite, drilling for the oil used to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser, you think the time and effort for all that amounts to ten seconds? Looking at a single pencil, 10 seconds is well in excess of what is actually spent. Yes, if you are only making a single pencil, then it would take much, much more, but the labor savings from mass production is precisely what makes the modern society possible, and this is precisely how the situation today is very different from how things worked in the past. No-one has spent more than a few seconds in labor in that single pencil of yours, simply because they spent their thousands of hours of labor on producing very large quantities of varying commodities, vanishingly small portion of which were spent on making that single pencil. And this is exactly the key difference, because the woodcutters and colliers who did all those thousands of hours of labor to produce that charcoal did very emphatically not produce a large quantities of product, only some of which was actually spent on smelting that iron. All of the products of their labor was consumed for just a relatively small amount of iron. Note that no-one is talking about complexity here. Modern steel manufacture is definitely more complex than it was in the early iron age. We are talking about marginal cost. And that is where all the difference is.

kbenson 6y ago
> Yes, if you are only making a single pencil, then it would take much, much more, but the labor savings from mass production is precisely what makes the modern society possible Yes. And what I'm saying is that you can look at the base cost of inputs back then compared to now. A pencil today is cheap, but there are a lot of items that go into them, and all of those have seen a drastic drop in price as we've developed new techniques for harvesting those components. A pencil created in the same time period would have a vastly increased price too (obviously not as large as a sword). What I was originally trying to express, and it got kind of lost in my second comment, is that the original comment is right, but you can basically boil down the "hundreds or thousands of man hours chopping trees, managing slow burning fires, carting ore and wood around, etc" to "base component cost was exponentially higher". That concept was somewhat lost in my second comment, when I was going more into what inputs of a pencil, but didn't continue along with how those inputs have gotten cheaper over time. The cost to make one manually doesn't exactly show the cost of doing it before modern practices, but it's much closer than modern materials harvesting practices, so gives a better idea of what the cost would be back then. I wasn't trying to contradict with my first comment, but to expand and note there are ways of looking at this that scale along well and help you think along the lines of why things cost what they do at certain times. If you think of a sword as a set of inputs, and then ask yourself what those cost in the 1300's, you'll quickly come to the realization that swords were very expensive because all the things that went into making them were very expensive by the nature of harvesting and/or processing them.

kbenson 6y ago

> Yes, if you are only making a single pencil, then it would take much, much more, but the labor savings from mass production is precisely what makes the modern society possible Yes. And what I'm saying is that you can look at the base cost of inputs back then compared to now. A pencil today is cheap, but there are a lot of items that go into them, and all of those have seen a drastic drop in price as we've developed new techniques for harvesting those components. A pencil created in the same time period would have a vastly increased price too (obviously not as large as a sword). What I was originally trying to express, and it got kind of lost in my second comment, is that the original comment is right, but you can basically boil down the "hundreds or thousands of man hours chopping trees, managing slow burning fires, carting ore and wood around, etc" to "base component cost was exponentially higher". That concept was somewhat lost in my second comment, when I was going more into what inputs of a pencil, but didn't continue along with how those inputs have gotten cheaper over time. The cost to make one manually doesn't exactly show the cost of doing it before modern practices, but it's much closer than modern materials harvesting practices, so gives a better idea of what the cost would be back then. I wasn't trying to contradict with my first comment, but to expand and note there are ways of looking at this that scale along well and help you think along the lines of why things cost what they do at certain times. If you think of a sword as a set of inputs, and then ask yourself what those cost in the 1300's, you'll quickly come to the realization that swords were very expensive because all the things that went into making them were very expensive by the nature of harvesting and/or processing them.