Profile — Polymath No. 06
The Economics of a Well-Made Chair
Tomasz Achterberg left the central bank to prove that slow production pays. He publishes the receipts.
Every chair Tomasz Achterberg sells arrives with a receipt nobody asked for. It lists the timber, the hours, the wage of the maker, the rent of the workshop and the margin. The total is high. Customers rarely complain.
For a decade Tomasz modelled labour markets at a central bank. He built furniture at weekends to stay sane and slowly realised his hobby was a better laboratory than his models. In 2019 he resigned and signed a lease on a former ship-repair shed.
Open-book making
The workshop employs nine makers on salaries above the regional average. Every cost is published, every year, including the mistakes. It is profitable, though modestly, and Tomasz considers the modesty part of the design.
His book The Price of Patience argued that transparency changes what buyers value. It was meant for economists and became a quiet favourite among founders, who now visit the workshop in small, earnest groups.
He still writes papers, now with sawdust on the keyboard. The question has not changed, he says. He just has better data.
When you show people the full cost of a thing, they stop asking why it is expensive and start asking why everything else is cheap.
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