If I Could Have One Thing On A Desert Island, It Would Be You
. . . is it weird that I’m referring to the division of labor? If you’ve not heard of this term before, I urge you to watch the short, brilliant animation “I, Pencil” before continuing.
It began like this: there is a writer in Auckland, New Zealand named Peter Cresswell. He offers free weekly classes on economics. During my time there, I attended his classes, and at one in particular, he began with this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit”:
“Hell is other people.”
Peter offered no immediate opinion of his own, but rather asked the class what we thought of the sentiment. I tried imagining to myself all the ways in which other people might be hell: while waiting in lines, when hearing others’ loud cell phone conversations in public, during traffic jams. . . Just as I became lost in thought, he commanded our attention with a definitive declaration that Sartre was, in fact, quite mistaken.
My interest was piqued. What element of economics could this Kiwi possibly be building up to?
He continued: take the classic Robinson Crusoe-like situation. Alone on an island, you are limited to eating what you alone can catch or gather, wearing what you yourself can patch together, and living in whatever shelter you yourself can manage to assemble. That is the extent of your material quality of life.
How, Peter asked, would any of us feel and fare in that situation? It did not take me long to conclude that I would surely die, though whether I would die of loneliness or exposure first would be up to chance.
Imagine, he then said, that someone else comes to the island. She can fish while you build a fire. She can gather rain water while you gather berries. She can break coconuts while you fashion rope.
And all in an instant, the lights flashed in my mind: The joy! The rapture! Production multiplies and we both live exponentially better lives because of it.
Guided from the image of myself wasting away on an island to the image of working with someone to catch food, fashion clothes, and make shelter burned this forever in my mind: the brilliant, bounteous blessing of other people!
But what about real life? Life not stranded on an island? Life in which you possibly hear from the news stations and the mouths of politicians that immigrants are “taking our jobs” and “ruining the economy”?
(Note: the depredations of the welfare state are a topic for another day).
Consider this situation: you are the owner of an apple orchard. You own three acres of apple trees and you can afford to hire five apple-pickers. You make $30,000 per year.
Like almost anyone else, you would prefer to make more money. Perhaps you want to buy a car or get that knee surgery you’ve been needing or send your cousin the money he needs to afford his first year at college. Or perhaps you just want to save for the future. You come to the conclusion that there’s only one way to increase your income – you must produce more apples. And there’s only one way to produce more apples: get more people to plant more trees and pick more apples.
When we look at how wealth is actually created, i.e. increased production, we quickly see that the old adage is as true for birthday parties as it is for business: the more the merrier! Ever-expanding orchards, ever-expanding staff, and ever-expanding income, all because of more people!
And so it is that the division of labor instills in me a small, strange love of every person who helps to produce something that I like. Because I cannot build computers. I cannot manufacture shoes, pianos, or high-powered juicers by myself. I owe everything I cherish to the beautiful and miraculous efforts of someone else. Someone doing something that could be considered insignificant at first glance: shuffling parts on an assembly line. Stamping documents. Washing dishes. Perhaps even pushing buttons.
In my moments of warm heart-clinchings, if my thoughts were broadcast into the air, the words would be this: “Thank you. Thank you for existing, because this world is cold and scary and vast, and I really, really don’t want to go it alone.”
And so we see that hell is not, in fact, other people, but quite the opposite: hell would actually be any force which attempts to tax, control, license, or even forbid trade with others, wouldn’t it?
And we all know exactly which force that is.
original location http://amandabillyrock.com/if-i-could-have-one-thing-on-a-desert-island
archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130703105044/http://amandabillyrock.com/if-i-could-have-one-thing-on-a-desert-island
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