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A comment on Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth. Parent comment

Re:Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Ec... by deogeo on Friday March 01, 2019 @02:49PM (#19284592)
I think that greatly understates the problem. Even under the assumptions used to derive comparative advantage, the theory says nothing how the benefits of the trade are distributed. Not in "every individual's best interest" could well mean an entire country is worse off, and the other better off.

Even more crucially, it says nothing on what its effects with time are. It's optimizing for immediate benefits, with no regard for future ones. Export rice and import tractors, because it's cheaper at this moment, but it never lets you develop your own industries.

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Re:Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Ec... by abecedarius on Friday March 01, 2019 @07:55PM (#19286755)
What's an example of how an entire country gets worse off with free trade according to the model of comparative advantage? That model is shown in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Ricardo'... and I don't see how you get that result, unless you're thinking of someone powerful in that country just appropriating all the gains, which act it seems perverse to blame on trade.
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