Peter J. Welling III Professor Frazier Data 150 21 September 2021
The toaster project was a project where Thomas Thwaites tried to make an electric toaster from scratch. Thomas Thwaitus was not successful in his experiment. The project took nine months to complete and worked for about five seconds before it caught on fire. The significance of the experiment is that it was meant to show that development does not increase in output by an individual firm, the emergence of several factors provide citizens with good lives. According to Barder, economic models have not been successful in determining and predicting economic growth over the past 50 years. One of the models that failed to meet the criteria was the Washington consensus because of the ten items it had as reforms, it still failed in efforts to free up markets, they did not lead to convergence of development. Another example has to do with Ajaokuta Steel. This project had lots of investment tallying 5 billion dollars and cost the average Nigerian tax payer 29 million dollars on salaries alone. It ended up producing no steel at all and had many pitfalls. Poor management, corruption and the idea that institutions played a major role in the failure of the project took effect. Steve Jones was a famous evolutionary biologist. At uni-lever he was hired to help design a new nozzle for their ongoing experiment. His invention in the experiment turned out to be successful, the new nozzle was much better than they started with. The experiment was so successful the nozzle was 100 times more efficient than the previous one. Haile Sellasie was the last of the great emperors of Ethiopia until it was overthrown in 1984. The significance of Kapuscinski’s book, The Emperor is that the book illustrated economic value was being suppressed by any efforts to move to a more inclusive government. Sen would have described this suppression in a negative way. Sen supported the idea that famines and other issues did not occur in democracies that were responsive to the desires of their citizens. So he would not have agreed with how the rulers of Ethiopia handled the ruling of their country. I agree with Sen on his position, I think if Ethiopia had listened to the desires of their citizens their fall would have been much delayed.