Thomas Thwaites, a student at the Royal College of Art, decided to explore how cheap, everyday items are dependent on global supply chains that are invisible to consumers by attempting to replicate and construct a toaster out of raw materials. In the end, the toaster that he spent months designing worked for only a few seconds before the wires started melting. Thwaites intended to prove that it was possible to be self-sufficient. However, his project revealed how truly difficult it is to be self-sufficient and that having more stuff, more cheaply is better. But this need to buy more and supply our economy comes at the expense of the environment. As Barder mentions, his partial success proved the idea that development is “the emergence of a system of economic, financial, legal, social, and political institutions, firms, products, and technologies, which together, provide citizens with the capabilities to live happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives.”
According to Barder, most economic models over the past 50 years have been unsuccessful at describing and predicting growth. He discussed the Harrod-Domar model, which was developed after the Second World War, and stated that a firm can increase its output if it can increase its capital and its labor. Developing countries are often not short of labor, but are of capital. However, this model is not true of reality. It couldn’t explain how fast South Korea had developed but Ghana had not. Next, he discussed Robert Solow and the Neoclassical growth theory, which introduced a third component on top of labor and capital, which he termed exogenous technical change. He explains this to be an unexplained “magic ingredient” which when combined with capital and labor, increases a firm’s output. However, he mentions that technological change cannot be a component as knowledge is cheaply reproduced, unlike labor and capital.
Steve Jones, now a famous evolutionary biologist, first started out working in a factory making soap powder. The process of making this powder was mixing a bunch of chemicals in liquid form, then forcing the mixture out using a spray nozzle, crystallizing the soap powder. A significant part of the process was the nozzle, which Steve Jones was in charge of designing. He made 10 copies of the existing nozzle and randomly distorted each of them. He then measured which ones worked best and took 10 copies of that nozzle, randomly distorted them, repeating the process again 45 times. No one knows why the final nozzle works, but it works much better than the original. His results were significant as they revealed that adaptive change doesn’t just bring about small improvements, it brings about game-changing jumps to new solutions and ideas.
Haile Sellasie was the emperor of Ethiopia until he was overthrown in 1974. His last days were described in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book, The Emperor. He vividly describes Haile Sellasie’s life as a “dark fairytale” as all the decisions came from the emperor. It was dangerous to tell the emperor about the poverty and starvation in the countryside. His book revealed the “internal logic of these regimes” which were achieved by extorting economic value from the population and suppressing any efforts to a more inclusive society and that could threaten his position. Amartya Sen would have described this suppression as an unfreedom, freedom being the principal means of development. He believed that development was the process of expanding human freedoms. I completely agree with his ideas about unfreedoms, the main ones in Ethiopia being, the lack of economic choice and political rights.