Two themes came together for me in a post I just read by Afrocity celebrating the first birthday of her blog yesterday, April 8. One is the power of a dream to transform one’s life — the dream of going to the prom, the dream of marriage. I’ve been too emotional about the story of the lesbian teen who sued to attend her prom with her date to write about it, yet, but this post illustrates WHY THE PROM IS SUCH A BIG DEAL and worth going to court over.

The other theme Afrocity brings up was featured in a reply I wrote to a comment this morning asking how many black entrepreneurs, millionaires and billionaires never came to be because of the Great Society welfare system’s vision of blacks as helpless victims — and the viciousness with which it punished getting a job and working one’s way out of poverty.

Well, Afrocity wrote the most moving story of how the dream of going to the prom in a beautiful dress gave her the motivation she needed to get out of the welfare system that destroyed her mother’s life:

One of the reasons I am against government assistance is because I grew up on it. And yes, it fed me, kept me adequately healthy, but did it advance me or my mother? No. Did it pay for my prom dress? No. Prom was a big deal to a 17-year-old girl. How would the $250 government check pay for my prom gown, my hair appointment, my #352 pink-dyed shoes to match my dress and my jewelry? The answer was, it would not. Mother went looking for dresses at the Salvation Army store, meanwhile Afrocity began looking for a job. This image of one of us actually working was a bit much for my mother to handle, “you know they will cut us off,” she warned.

I did not care, I had a date with a Victor Costa gown at Nieman Marcus. School by day, working until 1am as a hostess at a Mexican restaurant was tough. In retrospect, it was dangerous to take the bus home so late at night. My school work was neglected B’s morphed into C’s. One night I was so tired, I fell asleep with the curling iron still rolled in my hair. When you are young, you can put up with a lot and my first paycheck made all of the trouble worth it. My first paycheck — that I earned for my work. Money not for nothing but for something I did besides being black and poor. I came to a particular understanding that my mother had yet to achieve. Welfare may let you survive but it doesn’t let you live. Maybe I got the job out of necessity. I had a need that a welfare check could not fulfill. I had a dream about a dress but what about my life beyond the dress? What happens when welfare will not pay for your dreams?

What happened to Afrocity is wonderful and you will feel blessed to meet her — go read the rest of the story and wish her every blessing always.

The caption from the February issue of Wired reads as follows:

In an age of open source, custom-fabricated, DIY product design, all you need to conquer the world is a brilliant idea.

From the video:

The way you would shop on Amazon is not so different from the way you are now shopping for custom manufacturing in China. Now I have access to the exact same factories, tools, manufacturing technologies that the biggest companies of the world have access to and I can order at a scale that makes sense for me.

What happens when you democratize the tools of production is that more people produce. And when more people produce they make different things. They make things the big companies might not have made, which gives you the long tail of stuff.

This Wired story is one of the most exciting things I’ve read in a long time because it explains the expansion of opportunity for success in manufacturing, especially for niche products, to the level of individuals. It also demonstrates the success of individuals to duplicate the resources available to large companies through crowdsourcing and open source designs — while being far more nimble in seizing opportunities and reacting to market conditions than large companies with ponderous bureaucracies. THIS is what Hayek was talking about in unleashing the power of individual creativity and ambition as the true drivers of thriving economies and scientific and technological innovation:

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

From the February Wired story, “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits,” by Chris Anderson.

Via Prof. Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, who wrote a column on the subject in 2005, “Do It Make It Yourself“:

I’m currently reading Neil Gershenfeld’s new book, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop: From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, and I’m finding it very interesting. It seems that the future may be arriving sooner than I had expected.

(snip)

Gershenfeld writes that it’s possible to do a surprising amount of general-purpose personal design and manufacturing work by combining existing off-the-shelf components in new ways, and he spends a lot of time talking about the results of his experiments in that direction. His discussions are very interesting, but to me the most interesting thing was his discovery that lots of people want this kind of capability — not because they hope to make money out of it, necessarily, but because they want to be able to make things for themselves that they can’t buy elsewhere.

(snip)

This is likely to have several interesting consequences. On the one hand, it’s likely to address some of the problems with product design that I’ve mentioned. On another, it’s likely to give a big push to the trend toward cottage industry that I’ve noted before. And, in a larger sense, it’s likely to produce a substantial economic shift in general.

Instapundit also noted in an update from reader Ry Jones that in Seattle “you can rent makerbots and lasers by the minute.”

Yo, Obama! THIS is what creates jobs!