What Lawn Mowers Can Teach Us
The greatest single life enhancing step you can take in early summer is to change your lawn mower blade.
It's a thing that gets ever duller with youth and you adjust and adjust to the diminished cutting ability with each mow
until the point that you think it is normal, that it takes all your strength to shove the thing across the yard
Let's start and leave a trail of clippings and unevenly cut grass in your wake.
You can do something about this, and it doesn't involve sharpening with a whetstone.
A new blade costs ten bucks or so.
In a few minutes, you will find yourself gliding across the lawn, as if on rollerblades.
Maybe you think that your mower is an old off-brand and it's not likely that the hardware
store will have it.
Not.
There is one right there on the shelf that fits perfectly as you will see.
The length will be right, the holes for the screws will be in the right place, and it
will have the right groove things that make it settle in there like it was meant to be.
The existence of replacement parts of this sort is nothing to take for granted.
Note that the replacement part is probably not made by the same company that made your
and Mower, which might be very old, or even by a defunct company.
An amazing market standardization has taken place.
And how?
To me, it is not intuitively obvious why this sort of standardization would happen.
Imagine that you are the king, and in charge of economic planning.
It occurs to you that people need new lawnmower blades, lest summers in your kingdom be a
A Relentless Source of Frustration for all the people.
Perhaps the first thought is that we need some sort of regulation that will impose a
sort of uniformity so that new blades will fit old mowers and that blades will be compatible
across brand names.
In any case, this is how someone who has no faith in the market might think.
But look at the market in fact.
The best possible standardization has occurred in a way that provides the highest benefit
to the broadest swath of consumers.
And it happens without a single edict or vote, and without any commission meetings or bureaucratic
investigations.
It turns out to be in everyone's interest, and so it is done.
The problem of replacement parts is a huge part of the engineering process for any good
you buy.
This is because capitalist production considers the long-term value of a good and how it will
will be used in real life.
This is not the norm under socialism.
In the experience of the Soviet Union, fantastic amounts of machines of all sorts stood idle
year after year because the users couldn't find replacement parts, which weren't typically
part of the central plan, or if they were, they were the parts you didn't need.
When anything broke, it stayed that way, or was replaced with an entirely new machine
that broke in the same way, and so on.
This problem tended to play havoc with the production data.
It means nothing for 50,000 farm tractors to be produced in a factory for each of three
straight years if one-third of them are useless at any given time.
That's not to say that all capitalist production encourages fixing things rather than replacing
them.
When I was younger, it was common to fix everything – clocks, irons, radios, stereos, televisions.
I vaguely remembered tubes.
Now of course you have guarantees that guarantee replacement, and if the guarantee is out,
you just toss it in the trash.
My mother had the iron she received at her wedding shower for 20 years.
Now we think nothing of tossing them out and getting a new one for six bucks at Walmart.
So whether something should be replaced or fixed isn't something you can know a priori.
This is an economics question that is entirely dependent on economic conditions that are
known only in the real-world experience of the market economy.
We might, for example, someday advance to the point that farm equipment should be tossed
First out rather than fixed, just as with microwaves, stereos, iPods and so many other
small machines.
Again, no central plan can determine, in advance, what is the most economically advantageous
practice, apart from real market experience.
It turns out, for example, that there was more wrong with my lawnmower this year than
just the blade.
One minute it ran fine, and then, when I tried to restart, it would run for three or four
4 seconds and then sort of sputter out like it was out of gas.
Now I knew all about air filters, oil blades, but how the fuel gets to the engine involved
a part of this machine that I just hadn't had any experience with.
I took it to the repair guy at the small engine shop who said he would be happy to work on
it but it wouldn't be ready for two weeks.
This of course is ridiculous.
I asked him if he could fix it right now, since it will probably only take 10 minutes.
He said no, that would not be fair to other customers.
I pointed out that fairness had nothing to do with it, since his existing customers have
already contracted to wait up to two weeks, whereas I would like to have mine fixed now.
Still, even in the face of this impenetrable logic, he refused.
The next step was perfectly obvious.
I had to go to a convenience store at the outskirts of town and wait for a customer
who had the look of someone who knew about lawn mowers and ask him.
Finally, the obvious candidate appeared and I marched up to him and told him what my mower
was doing, replicating the sound.
He knew immediately that it was the carburetor and explained how to clean it.
Back home, I did what he said and the mower started right up again, and it gave me great
satisfaction to know that the fool who was babbling on about fairness was denied my business.
Now, part of the reason it was urgent that I get this fixed right away had to do with
an unlikely charitable act on my part, which brings me to another life lesson given to
us by the lawn experience.
One day, about a month ago, my neighbor's lawn was looking pretty shabby, but she was
out of town.
I waited as long as I could and finally decided to undertake the good deed of mowing it.
I did one better.
I edged it, weed and feeded it, and weed-whacked it.
Glorious results, and when the neighbor returned, she praised me to the skies.
Now the wise reader is right now laughing at my incredible stupidity.
Apparently the whole world knows a rule in life that had entirely escaped me.
Never mow your neighbor's lawn lest you be stuck with the unpaid job for 20 years.
It's like giving a stray cat milk. It only seems like the right thing to do, but you
end up having to do it at regular intervals. Since my unfortunate act of charity, I found
several people who have stumbled into this precise situation in which they ended up mowing
several people's lawns on the weekend and resenting the heck out of it. So, as I mowed
and mowed, I began to think about opportunity costs. I wonder what I could be doing right
This really got me thinking about paid charity in general.
What are the ethical issues associated with, for example, paying someone to stand in your
Your Place at the Soup Kitchen Perhaps you could pay many people to do all
your volunteer work for you, provided it is not too specialized, and that the opportunity
costs associated with your doing it exceed what you would have to shell out to volunteer
by proxy.
Isn't this what we are really doing when we donate to charity?
You might say, hey, you're giving up the spiritual benefit that comes from doing the
It is at least conceptually possible that doing good deeds should also be subject to
the logic of the division of labor like everything else.
You might say, that is crass, but this much we learn from a weekend's experience with
the lawn mower.
The market may not give us a perfect world, but market-based thinking can get us closer
to the best possible world on which no amount of central planning could possibly ever improve.