Your Teacher Said What?! (12 page)

They've been around quite a while, as well. A couple of years ago, archaeologists found a leather shoe in present-day Armenia that was made more than five thousand years ago, and not only does it look no more beat up than Scott's sneakers after a day playing in the mud, but it was held together with, you guessed it, laces. Shoes using eyelets and cross-lacing have been around since at least the twelfth century. Shoelaces are what you might call a mature technology.

And no one knows how to make them. Or more accurately, “not a single person on the face of the earth knows how to make” them.

That “not a single person” line is taken from an essay written by a man named Leonard Read in 1958. Titled “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read,” it is a short but illuminating explanation of the miraculous way in which technology, raw materials, transportation, and science are brought together by literally millions of people to manufacture a simple “lead” (really graphite) pencil, and how, even though every one of those millions knows a little bit about the processes involved, no one knows the whole story. More to the point—this is an essay about free markets, after all, one regularly cited by Milton Friedman—it is about how those millions of people, and their transactions, somehow manage to organize themselves to produce that pencil, without, as Read puts it, any “master mind . . . dictating or forcibly directing” them.

And I thought that there wasn't any better way to show Blake and Scott the incredible power of an undirected free market than with a pair of shoelaces.

The particular shoelaces used for the exercise weren't anything special: two thirty-six-inch lengths of cotton and polyester, capped with acetate tips and packaged on a couple of inches of cardboard. But their journey to Scott's shoes took us on a trip around the world and through a whole lot of centuries.

Cotton first:

 

“Scott?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know what this is?”

“Uh, a string?”

“If it were still in a sneaker, you'd know, wouldn't you?”

“It's a shoelace!”

“You bet it is. And it's partly made out of cotton. You know what cotton is?

“Like cotton balls?”

“Just like.”

Actually, cotton balls are the product that most closely resembles the most valuable part of the plant before it gets processed. As with any other form of life, all parts of the cotton plant are pretty useful, but the one that matters to the shoelace manufacturer (in fact, to anyone who wants to turn cotton into money) is the seedpod, which is roughly the size and shape of the cotton balls we keep in the bathroom and is responsible for contributing several hundred billion dollars to the world's economy every year. The pods—the bolls—are where the plant grows something that looks like hair: fibers a couple of inches long. Since those hairs have to be spun into yarn, the plants that had the longest ones—“long-staple” cotton—were the most popular ones for thousands of years until a onetime tutor from Massachusetts named Eli Whitney invented his first cotton gin in 1794.

Whitney's invention—hooks attached to a rotating cylinder next to a wire screen—wasn't something anyone told him to create. His moment of revelation—he watched a cat try to pull a bird through a wire fence, leaving a bunch of feathers behind—came because he realized that the short-staple cotton of Georgia and South Carolina would be worth a
lot
more money if someone could separate it from its seeds.

And it was. The gins of Gujarat, India, where the cotton in Scott's shoelaces comes from, are more than just bigger, higher-powered versions of Whitney's original; modern cotton-stripping machines pound the cotton with rollers, bats, and brushes and knock the cleaned bolls onto a conveyer, but the principle is the same. The shoelace manufacturers don't need to know much about growing cotton, though, any more than the cotton farmers need to know how to make a shoelace.

They
do
have to know how to raise a crop of cotton bolls before bollworms—moth larvae, an even bigger threat today than the boll weevil that terrified cotton farmers in the early part of the twentieth century—can eat the profits right out from under them. Spraying cotton plants with insecticides, though, has a lot of nasty side effects, which is why some really clever chemists came up with a new variety of cotton that modified the plant's DNA so it could produce a bacterium with the tongue-twisting name
B. thuringiensis
. No central planner told the folks at Monsanto to come up with Bt cotton,
¹⁷
and neither the cotton farmer not the shoelace maker really knows—or needs to know—how they did it.

Cleaning cotton is only the first step on the way to Scott's shoes, though. Those two- to three-inch-long fibers need to be twisted, or spun, at an angle into a much longer and stronger thread, or yarn. The yarn then needs to be woven—with polyester filaments, about which more below—into the quarter-inch-wide strings that can eventually hold a shoe on an eight-year-old foot.

Indian cotton workers have been using spinning wheels and spindles to spin high-quality cotton for centuries—so much so that Great Britain passed laws in 1700 and 1720 to prohibit imports of the stuff from its own colony. But India's productivity advantage (essentially a really huge labor force; a lot of India's productivity still depends on its population) had vanished by the late eighteenth century, when a bunch of British inventors came up with a whole raft of inventions to automate the spinning and weaving process: the spinning jenny, for example, a spinning wheel turned on its side, operating multiple spindles simultaneously, and powered by either water or steam. Or the “mule,” which tied a spindle carriage to a loom, or weaving frame, and was therefore able to convert cotton into cloth in one powered operation.

India's cotton producers got the message, though not as a result of central planning. The country is now covered with cotton mills that use the latest version of this technology to produce thirty-five million bales—a bale of cotton is about five hundred pounds—annually, for everything from sailcloth to underwear . . . to shoelaces.

Of course, the woven fibers that will eventually become Scott's shoelaces wouldn't really pass muster unless we could buy them in a color he found appealing: bright red. The manufacture of dyes that are used to turn the dirty-white color of the natural cotton into something that could be used on a fire engine is a pretty huge industry itself. The Gujarat plants that supply the dye—“direct dye,” which bonds chemically to the cotton fibers—to the neighboring cotton mills are, like the farmers planting genetically modified seeds, the inheritors of thousands of years of applied science. Also, they don't care about shoelaces, but they
love
vivid colors. Come to think of it, just like Scott.

But neither the cotton farmer nor the mill worker (nor the manufacturers of the picking, spinning, or weaving equipment, much less the inventors of the original technology behind Bt cotton or the automated looms) actually has any interest in shoelaces. Each of them performs a single indispensable function and neither knows or needs to know anything much about the stuff everyone else is doing.

 

“So, Scott, now that you know how cotton balls get turned into the kind of fabric that we're going to make your shoelaces from, I've got another question for you.”

“Okay.”

“How many people, do you think, does it take to just grow, spin, and weave the cotton?”

“Five thousand? No . . . five million? No . . . a
billion
!”

“Let's just use the small number for now. What that means is that five thousand people get up every morning and go plant or pick or spin cotton, some of which is going to end up in your shoelaces. My question is: How do they know what to do?”

 

While some shoelaces are made out of 100 percent cotton, Scott's are made out a combination of cotton and polyester, which is one of a whole lot of products we call “synthetic” but whose raw material was originally organic: crude oil.

Here's how it works: The oil that's pumped out of the ground—in Saudi Arabia, for example—is like a really complicated stew, the ingredients of which are valuable for something used in making a pair of shoelaces. The “lightest” parts (the ones that are lightest in color are the ones with the most carbon) are the easiest to burn, so they're turned into the gasoline that powers the trucks that carry the components of those simple laces (also the aviation fuel used on airfreight carriers and the diesel used by ships and trains). The darker parts, though, are just as important. Making the molecules that will turn into the polyester that is combined with the cotton in Scott's laces is the job of both the refineries that “unmix” the stew (the process is called “fractional distillation”) and the petrochemical plants that take the heavier parts of the crude oil and turn them into propene, and eventually polyester.

 

“So, Scott, where do your shoelaces come from?”

“Arabia?”

 

Not yet, they don't. The petrochemical plant where the polypropylene is manufactured is in China, in a place called Jinjiang City. The thousands of people who work in the plant
wear
shoes, of course, but they don't have to know that part of their job is making the stuff that will be attached to the shoelaces that keep the shoes on their feet. They just have to know that there's a buyer for their plastics and a seller where they can, in turn, buy their raw materials.

 

“How
do
they know what to do?”

“Do you think someone is telling everyone what to do, Scott?”

“Yeah! That's it.”

“Who?”

“The president? No . . . the richest man in the world?”

“Neither one. In fact, no one is telling them what to do, or rather, everyone is telling everyone what to do.”

“I don't get it.”

 

Those shoelaces weren't, of course, just hanging on a shelf all by themselves. They were attached to a piece of cardboard that told us how long they were, how much they cost, and who made them (and, luckily for me,
where
they were made).

The cardboard didn't come from Arabia or China or India, though.
That
piece of the story took us to a pulp mill in Canada, where trees are turned into paper. Those shoelaces, therefore, are indirectly depending on hundreds of
other
machines: In pulp mills, debarkers remove the bark from trees, chippers turn the remaining wood into usable sizes, and digesters use chemicals to transform the chips into something resembling wet oatmeal. And then, in the paper mill, a single machine uses rollers, dryers, and formers to convert the wet oatmeal—okay, the slurry—into all kinds of paper—in the case of Scott's shoelaces, cardboard.

By now, the yarn, plastic, and cardboard have traveled just about halfway around the world, encountering thousands (at least) of people operating different machines at just about every stop. I suppose someone could make a shoelace or a shoe—or even Leonard Read's pencil—by hand. No one does. There are literally thousands of different machines needed, from the cotton harvesters (which not only pick the cotton bolls but also remove their seeds) to the automated spinning and weaving machines that turn it into yarn and cloth. Then there are the oil derricks and pumps that extract oil from under the sand and the fractional distillers that turn crude oil into dozens of different products: fuel to operate the trucks, ships, and trains that transport every item needed for Scott's shoelaces, and also the detergents that clean them and the plastic used for the polyester in the fabric. Other machinery is used to turn trees into cardboard and cotton/polyester into yarn.

None of the people who manufacture (or even operate) those machines know much about anything but their own little piece of the operation, of course. They don't even know anything about the equipment by which the steel used to make them is made from the iron dug out of mines all over the world and melted into something called “pig” iron: the open hearths, blast and arc furnaces, and rolling mills. Scott's shoelaces even need machines to make
other
machines: lathes, shapers, grinders, and dozens more (most of them now operated by computers, but you get the idea).

Up to this point, however, Scott's five thousand (or one billion) workers have been sort of laboring in the dark. Only at the last stop—the shoelace factory—do people really see the final product. That's where shoelace-braiding machines, each of which looks like a really big wagon wheel laid on its side, weave those polyester-cotton yarns from India together like ribbons round a maypole. A long string—a
very
long string—emerges from each machine every twenty seconds or so.