> 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

> 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.