The toaster project was an endeavor by Thomas Thwaites to build a functioning toaster from scratch, using only raw materials. Thwaites reverse-engineered a cheap, functional toaster in order to determine the parts and materials he would need, and then procured the raw materials in order to fabricate the parts of a toaster. When he was finished, his toaster turned on but burst into flames because of a lack of insulation, so Thwaites called his project a “partial success.” The toaster project relates to the idea of complexity and development in that it showed that there are a wide variety of necessary resources and technology required for even seemingly simple phenomenon, analogous to how there are many different facets (i.e. economic, financial, legal, social, political) that play a role in shaping human development.
Over the past 50 years, economic models have done poorly at describing and predicting growth since they all failed to account for additional factors and complexity. Barder first discusses the Harrod-Domar model which was based on the idea that an increase in production requires more capital and labor. He then discusses how it failed to explain the disparity in growth paradigms between Ghana and South Korea, in that South Korea saw massive economic growth while Ghana was mostly stagnant. In addition, Barder discusses the Ajoakuta Steel works and how it had immense labor and capital from investment, but it was a failure because of corruption and poor management. It failed to account for the ramifications of institutional problems. Because each of the older economic models failed to account for the greater complexity at play, they were inaccurate a describing and predicting economic growth.
Steve Jones was a biologist who worked at uni-lever to design a better soap nozzle. He was very successful, as his ultimate design was hundreds of times more efficient than the original nozzle. In order to make an evolutionary jump forward, Jones made several copies of the nozzle, then randomly distorted each of them, and determined which distortions produced the best results. He then repeated the process using the best-performing nozzle from the previous generation. He did so for 45 generations in order to produce his final design. His results were significant because they showed the power of evolutionary growth in generating groundbreaking solutions.
Haile Sellasie was the last emperor of feudal Ethiopia. Ethiopia exemplified the suppression of emergent systemic change by extracting economic value from the population, suppressing any efforts to allow for justice and equality to prevail. Sen would have described this suppression as a vicious cycle of unfreedoms leading to more unfreedoms, because with the Ethiopian citizens not being able to freely relay information, they were unable to participate in any societal change, allowing the oppressive ruling class to further exploit resources and drive poverty. This cycle embodies the positive feedback mechanism that occurs when unfreedoms are present that Sen exemplifies with the Kader Mia anecdote.