"Comparative advantage" has always embodied, to me, the difficulty with electoral politics. It's a fairly easy concept, taught fairly widely, yet almost no one really understands it and views the world through that lens. Most voters are operating without an understanding of comparative advantage.
Now apply that to dozens of other concepts in other fields. Same situation. It's depressing.
The notion of comparative advantage that's presented in the article is a little facile though. IMO there are quite a number of real-world practicalities that derail the analysis:
* The infant industry argument. The analysis in TFA assumes comparative advantage is fixed: in reality advantage shifts all the time. Fifty years ago China had a comparative advantage in farming and not much else.
* Measuring comparative advantage: in order to make a good policy recommendation, we don't just know what each country does produce, we need to know how much each country could produce under a huge range of scenarios. Does anyone honestly know how much value a given country could produce if it decided to shift its entire economy in a new direction?
* Mobility of labour: instead of trading with other countries, why not just allow their workers to work in your country and reap the benefits at home? (I recognise that some advantages don't come directly from labour, but we do see this happen in low-skilled jobs). Even Ricardo recognised that labour mobility hurt his argument.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying that trade doesn't usually benefit both parties: I'm saying that _this argument_ isn't the smoking gun that demonstrates that fact.
Free trade based on the principle of comparative advantage only survives so long as the gains of free trade are adequately distributed to the public. Otherwise, the public will revolt and show the elites who's really in control, even if they don't end up better off in the short-medium term. In the long run, this can lead to reestablishment of free trade on more equal terms. The elites must preemptively make free trade work for everyone. That's not only moral, but it's rational too. It can help avoid an age of wasted potential and strife. The Great Depression was preceded by isolationism. Who wants to go through that again? Not me.
The point is, the ball is in the court of corporations and the wealthy. Money in politics will work for them until it doesn't. No amount of donations, ear whispering, and cocktail parties can avert popular rage. Trump supporters are only a taste of what may be coming, because Trump was easy on the rich (of course). There's no guarantee that the next populist president will be as nice to the rich. There's no guarantee that the next populist president won't be more capricious on free trade. The underlying ailments that gave rise to populism must be addressed as soon as possible. Critically, free trade is not the problem. The problem, like I said, is that the rich capture too much of the surplus from trade. More of that surplus should be going to education, bullet trains, research, socialized healthcare, etc...and it's not.
I know that feeling. I've accumulated a small collection of what I think of as "lenses". Simple ideas that help make sense of a lot of otherwise confusing observed human behavior. What I wouldn't give to inject them in the brain of everyone.
(Off the top of my head, a few for me are in-group/out-group behavior, path dependence, sunk cost fallacy, fundamental attribution error, and externalities.)
My field is propped up by various governments. My paycheck is a combination of sales, bailouts, and loan forgiveness. I also make lots of money.
Should I be in favor of cronyism?
I actually take the other side despite getting paid by them. These companies/Management made terrible decisions and continue to make terrible decisions. Instead of selling and replacing managers we are burdened with zombie companies.
I agree so much with this. The more I study economics, the more issues I run into that people ought to know but are unknown to everyone who hasn't studied it. Arrow's Impossibility theorem is another interesting one that perhaps ought to be more well known.
Arrow's theorem is nonsense that has set back election reform by decades. Because in any realistic scenario, "irrelevant" alternatives are never truly irrelevant. That is, Arrow's IIA assumption is simply not desirable or relevant.
Once IIA is relaxed to a sane axiom [read: abolished almost entirely], there are multiple methods that work like versions of STV. Besides, Arrow never applied to ordinal voting methods like Approval (which is OK) or Range (which I strongly dislike for other reasons).
In the quoted context I'd agree it isn't a great use. However I do think it's something worth knowing about.
Another economic topic would perhaps be marginalism, so we don't keep getting flooded with "but why is water cheaper than diamonds, it must be injustice/bad values/conspiracy".
And perhaps some kind of history of thought on value, so we don't get the simple version of labour theory, or the Fisher-Price version of utility theory again and again.
Perhaps I sound like a snob, but I find a lot of economic discussions are derailed by having to clear up confusions that appear repeatedly.
Arrow's impossibility theorem has always seemed a little fishy to me: I think the axioms are too strong (if you pressed me on this, I'd wonder if the 'independence of irrelevant alternatives' axiom is problematic).
The fact that it holds when there are three or more options but not for two options just doesn't sit right with me.
It turns out that there is very little scope to relax the axioms: for almost any voting scheme, there are circumstances where you do better by not voting your true preferences.
See the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.
Pretty much the only scheme that avoids this is "choose a voter at random and elect the candidate they like best".
>for almost any voting scheme, there are circumstances where you do better by not voting your true preferences.
Which isn't a very important consideration compared to other attributes of election methods. Usually, coordination and signalling problems make tactical voting inadvisable. But even when tactical voting does work, it's not necessarily a problem.
The source of all of Arrow's nonsense is treating an election as a very large opinion poll on a single candidate. Of course pollsters hate liars, so everyone who takes Arrow seriously tries to eliminate tactical voting.
However, that's the completely wrong model. An election is an opportunity for a citizen to use their equal political weight to try to steer the polity. If some citizens managed to be smart and use their political weight smartly good for them. So what if their vote wasn't their true preference?
Tactical voting is only a problem when the election method allows a minority to win frequently - because political weight isn't really equal in that case - but one can imagine methods where tactical voting can happen yet the winning candidate always ends up with a majority (e.g. France's 2-stage Presidential elections). In those cases, tactical voting is not a problem to be eliminated.
I think the root of the problem you’re getting at isn’t that we shouldn't have leaders we elect, but that education and trustworthy journalism in a democracy are vitally important.
Now apply that to dozens of other concepts in other fields. Same situation. It's depressing.