I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read

“I, Pencil” is a persuasive essay composed as a dramatic monologue in the voice of a lead pencil. Read published the essay in a specialized libertarian magazine, indicating that his intended audiences were economists, people educated in economics, and principally, the fellow conservatives who subscribed to The Freeman. In other words, Read is largely “preaching to the choir,” and the essay’s style is similar to that of a religious sermon or testimonial. Read was a devout Protestant, and his religious beliefs influenced his embrace of libertarian thought. Even the title—“I, Pencil”—is reminiscent of the Protestant theologian Martin Buber’s famous book I and Thou (1923). Read uses the pencil’s genealogical story as an allegory to thematically explore The Advantages of Dispersed Knowledge and The Value of Freedom.

Arguing on behalf of Adam Smith’s economic theory of the “invisible hand,” the essay is written from the first-person perspective of a pencil, which describes the intricacy of its own creation. In describing the pencil’s physical contents, as well as the countless people and various agencies involved in circulating pencils into everyday life, the essay reinforces the unseen interconnectivity of the global marketplace. As in many sermons, Read opens with a warning that society is in grave danger: “mankind” is committing a “grievous error” that imperils its very existence. He employs emotional and religious language from the onset to establish a mood of reverence: “wonder and awe,” “miraculousness,” “profound.” The pencil is not just an everyday household object but “a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning” (4). Only the supernatural, the reader may infer, is more mysterious than the wonders of nature.

The first titled section, “Innumerable Antecedents,” begins the thematic exploration of The Advantages of Dispersed Knowledge. Read gives a detailed description of the pencil’s “genealogy” to impress upon the reader how complex and globe-spanning are the various processes involved in its production. The style of this section is less emotional and more matter of fact. It consists of empirical description, but the first-person narration gives it the immediacy and informality of a personal testimony. Read periodically interrupts the narrative with direct appeals to the reader, much as a preacher would address the congregation, to elicit more active engagement with the story: “Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? […] How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?” (6). The pencil imagines all the gear used in harvesting such large amounts of cedar—saws, axes, ropes, motors, chains, etc.—as well as the unseen manpower needed to forge such tools to begin with—lumberjacks, mill workers, truck drivers, cement pourers, etc. Read emphasizes that the pencil’s antecedents are manifold to illustrate the vast scope of dispersed knowledge.

In the second section, “No One Knows,” Read returns to his initial claim and rhetorically asks whether it has been adequately supported: “Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?” (7). He seems confident the answer is “no” because he has clearly demonstrated that “millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others” (7). He acknowledges that some critics might accuse him of exaggerating the scope of the pencil’s supply chain by including even “the picker of a coffee berry in far-off Brazil,” without whom the timber workers would have no coffee to drink at their logging camp; but he doesn’t bother to rebut the accusation, simply responding, “I shall stand by my claim” (7). Such confident, almost dogmatic certainty is again reminiscent of a sermon.

The third section, “No Master Mind,” thematically transitions to The Value of Freedom. Read delivers the punchline of his sermon: the “astounding” fact that no one is “dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring [the pencil] into being” (8). In a sermon, the preacher would intone “But God” and go on to explain what God has done or will do with regard to the situation just described. Instead of God, Read and his readers “find the Invisible Hand at work” (8). Read doesn’t need to define “Invisible Hand” for his already initiated audience any more than a preacher needs to define “God.” Read repeats the words “mystery” and “miracle” to further evoke a reverent mood. In identifying “the Invisible Hand” as the “maker” of the pencil, Read equates its creation with the divine: “Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me” (8). The pencil lauds the capital of human creativity for being just as miraculous as the raw materials that make up a pencil, which are found in nature.

Read then exhorts his audience to have “faith in free people” (9)—that is, to trust that “the Invisible Hand” will guide market participants to make rational choices, just as God guides believers to live righteously. People who lack such faith “cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion” that they are in need of “governmental ‘masterminding’” (9), just as lack of faith in God leads fallible humans to perdition. Believing in the necessity of government planning, in other words, is akin to worshipping false idols. By accepting this lack of a “masterminding” agency (i.e., government), humanity will ensure its own freedom of will and prevent economic monopolies.

In the final section, “Testimony Galore,” Read reinforces this message with other examples of “the Invisible Hand” working its magic in situations “where men have been left free to try” (9). The final paragraph consists entirely of short, declarative sentences, in the style of a preacher firing up his congregants:

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed (10).

Read emphasizes the phenomenon of physical delivery as an example of the kind of freedom needed for the market to flourish. Mail delivery, a government proposal, is far costlier than the free market transport of oil or gas, for example. The final sentence evokes the poetry of a Bible verse: “I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth” (10). Read’s closing clarion call, or strong emotional appeal, assures readers that the belief in uninhibited creativity (i.e., free market activity without government intervention) is the only natural course.

Read’s main goal is not to change the minds of steadfast statists who typically didn’t read The Freeman. After demonstrating the truth of his initial claim—“not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make [a pencil]” (4)—he jumps directly to the conclusion that all government intervention is unfavorable, leaving out the intervening steps needed to arrive at this conclusion. He does not present or attempt to rebut obvious critiques of his reasoning; for example, most economists of all ideological orientations agree that government intervention is sometimes necessary to counteract certain socially undesirable outcomes of market exchange known as “market failures.” He doesn’t feel the need to do so because his aim is to proselytize, or champion his ideas. He aims to inspire those already convinced of the “miraculousness” of “the Invisible Hand” and to persuade the wavering so that they, filled with “wonder and awe” (4), may go forth and spread the word.

“I, Pencil” was used in American economist Milton Friedman’s 1980 telecast of Free to Choose, and the corresponding book of the same name, to demonstrate the “power of the market.” (“Power of the Market” is the title of the first segment of the TV show and the first chapter of the book.) In summarizing Read’s work for his own professional purposes, Friedman notes how Read’s essay helped spread the simple idea that “human freedom required private property, free competition, and severely limited government.”