It’s not that the construction of some thing, anything, that can be used to write with is difficult. As you point out a piece of charcoal isn’t hard to make.
Milton Friedman’s point is that even something as simple and inexpensive as a pencil involves people all over the world working together to create it. Some mine graphite, some run ships to move the graphite, some manufacture paint, some grow rubber trees, etc. All of this activity, coordinated and made efficient by the market is behind even a simple thing like a pencil.
I agree on goalpost but still differ on Friedman's point. Culture shifts into thinking you need objects to the point of making you forget what you wanted in the first place. Friedman wants to marvel at the thought of his beloved market.
Friedman does wax lyrical about his beloved market toward the end of that video, but the main point I drew from his quote about the pencil is that it's absolutely mind-blowing to stop and contemplate the incredible cooperation and pre-existing systems required to construct so many of the mundane, dirt-cheap objects of the modern world.
The fact that someone could eschew mass-produced lead pencils in favour of a self-made writing implement doesn't diminish the fact that it's practically impossible for any one individual on the planet to ever actually build a pencil you can buy for the equivalent of a few seconds to minutes of labour. That pencil, and so many other mundane items like it, are artifacts beyond the crafting capabilities of any one human.
I feel that again misses the point. Sure, it's perfectly possible for a resourceful and knowledgable human to hand-engineer various tools from the environment. But to make something very much like an ordinary pencil made of wood, graphite, rubber, metal, and paint would be a monumental task, far beyond the cost of a pencil in our established society.
The fact is that globalization and industrialization has democratized the construction of literal artifacts. Consider the single-use plastic bottle, with a precisely machined screw neck and matching lid. It's lightweight, transparent, and will last for years. It would be exceedingly difficult to find and process the raw material to craft such an artifact from scratch, yet millions of them per day are used once and discarded.
Same goes for most office supplies, now that I think of it. And we haven't even touched integrated circuits yet.
I kinda see, the value is in efficiency of delegation but IMO there are drawbacks that this 'efficient' perspective hides, namely people believe you can't do anything without the market.
The complexity of a modern economy is more about efficiency than anything else.
If you want a pencil that uses graphite and an eraser, that’s actually fairly easy to construct with the correct raw materials. A single person in the right location and with the right knowledge could have made a single pencil 1,000 years ago, though the pencil would not have been worth the effort. Further, they could not have made 100,000 of them where I could actually buy 100,000 pencils by being part of the modern economy.
It’s not that the construction of some thing, anything, that can be used to write with is difficult. As you point out a piece of charcoal isn’t hard to make.
Milton Friedman’s point is that even something as simple and inexpensive as a pencil involves people all over the world working together to create it. Some mine graphite, some run ships to move the graphite, some manufacture paint, some grow rubber trees, etc. All of this activity, coordinated and made efficient by the market is behind even a simple thing like a pencil.