I, Toaster

Fascinating. A British artist puts a passage from a Douglas Adams novel to the test, and ends up recreating my favorite economics parable.

Thwaites may well end up making some approximation of a modern toaster, but he'll come nowhere near his stated goal of having made one on his own. He notes on his website, for example, that he used a microwave (which of course he didn't create from scratch) to smelt the iron ore he found into steel. He used modern transportation to collect his various raw ingredients. And he fed and nourished himself through the whole process with food produced by modern agriculture and industry. No single man can make a pencil, and as Thwaites' project will demonstrate, no single man is capable of making a toaster, either.

Okay, I think it's fascinating. But I have a favorite economics parable.