Self-sufficiency is therefore not the route to prosperity. ‘Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,’ Henry David Thoreau asked: ‘the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father?’
