A pencil, by almost any measure, is an exquisitely complex thing. Somewhere in a harvested forest was the stand of cedar trees that gave up their wood to provide the pencil's dowel. Somewhere in the Jamaican interior is the bauxite mine that provided the raw material for its little aluminum sleeve. Somewhere in the coal belt is the mine that provided the lump carbon for the graphite. Still elsewhere is the lab where the raw polymers were cooked up into rubbery erasers. And to those places that provided those things streamed still other things -- the smelting ovens for the metal plants, the autoclaves for the rubber labs, the blades for the sawmills, the backhoes for the carbon mines, the cotton to dress the lab workers, the bacon to feed the lumberjacks, the paymasters and truck drivers and box packers and shipping managers to keep all of the operations humming. A vast industrial machine rises up, switches on, and at its far end, spits out... a pencil, arguably one of the most complicated objects in the world. From Simplexity, by Jeffrey Kluger
Wow! Isn't that incredible? Think about all that in light of all we've learned in class. Choose another "simple" good and write about all the economic interactions that "magically" came together to get that good onto the shelves of Al Jazira market.
