The Benefits Of Trade
Russ Robert’s new EconTalk podcast is a long soliloquy which traverses the benefits of trade from Adam Smith and David Ricardo. He then adds his own thinking on how Ricardo may have been wrong in certain assumptions.
For those of you who don’t have a solid understanding of the theories of specialization and comparative advantage this is an excellent introduction. For those of you who do, Robert’s extends the ideas of Ricardo in a practical sense.
And for those of you inclined to think that we need to shut the gates to international trade you’re well served to listen if for nothing more than to hear a solid argument that you are obliged to defend against.
Good stuff. About an hour long.
I’m sure your “benefits of trade” worked just dandy in a small regional basis in Scotland back in the 1700’s When Adam Smith wrote about it but its time to leave your fantacy world behind,Dave.
We’re running a 700 billion dollar trade deficet ,mostly with China who use your insane love of the freemarket famtacy to beat the s… out of us using their highly controlled banking and industrial system.
Yeah, right. And in the 80’s the Japanese were going to take over the world. Obviously you didn’t listen to the podcast or you dismissed the point about temporary structural displacement.
One more thing, your notion that Smith’s ideas are anachronistic is quaint. Maybe you should ask Paul Krugman what he thinks of it, or Joseph Stiglitz, or Christina Romer or any left leaning (or right leaning) economist in the world today. Certainly the conventional wisdom can be wrong but there has never been any credible model that disproves either Smith or Ricardo on the basic good of trade.
Actually, the Japanese were going to take over the world in the 1930s and 1940s. But that didn’t work out.