An Oversight in George F. Will’s Corporate Cosmology

There are only a few magazines I read so thoroughly that I run out of articles before the replacement shows up on the newsstand, but Newsweek is one of them. The last page alternately written by Anna Quindlen and George Will is a favorite. While Ms. Quindlen is a superior writer (I'd kill for that clarity and flow in writing), I usually find George Will's perspective refreshing and enlightnening.

However, this weeks foray into the interdependence of our economy as constrained by all other world economies misses the mark for me on one key issue. The anecdote of a wooden pencil being the product of four distinct parts that are based on raw material from four regions of the world is cute and awe-inspring, but it doesn't happen the way Will and the economists he endorses say it does. He states, "goods … result from innumerable human actions but not from any human design"

Really?! All the artifacts around us just happen out of "emergent behavior"? You are missing a very important player in this – the designers – both the engineers and the industrial. Without them, the pencil would not exist. Perhaps this isn't of interest to these pundits and economists, but we shouldn't forget that inventor spirit. It's what made this country great. Seriously, that sounds corny, but I'll go further and say it wasn't freedom of religion, or a "perfect" democracy, but the inventions that Americans bore. These inventions went on to change infrastructure, create jobs, and a quality of life beyond what is percievable by only examinig such economics. In the current crisis, we have shouldn't forget this. Plus a career inventing things would be pretty damn fulfilling.