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mwengler comments on Comparative and absolute advantage in AI - Less Wrong Discussion
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It is a little hard to believe that the entire colonial era did not consist of nations with absolute advantage taking resources from other humans with much less of an economy. Even now, there is nearly a factor of 300 between the most and least productive (per capita) countries. Tell me how that is not a good measure of absolute advantage.
Perhaps you consider post-Renaissance Europe with its industrial age and so on to be a blip on the human radar? I think you are going to find Greek and especially Roman domination of its neighbors to be easily traced to economic absolute advantages, although I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers.
Remember, absolute advantage means being better at everything. As such it is far from trivial to find a case were true absolute advantage is held. Of course, invasion and exploitation are not done only in conditions of complete absolute advantage...
A US hour of labor produces 9 times the tradable value of a Chinese hour of labor.. Absolute advantage would mea that there is NOTHING that China could produce with fewer labor hours than the US could produce. In fact, as you suggest, there is probably something. Things like Chinese art. Chinese tourism. Perhaps even a few special gourmet Chinese items of food.
But how much does the existence of these items change the big picture? In terms of labor hours, we outproduce the Chinese on the stuff we sell them by on average a little more than a factor of 9 while we outproduce them on the stuff they sell us by some factor much greater than 1, but less than 9. Would some collection of highly unique products that comprise way under 10%, possibly under 1% of the total economic value traded really change anything?
I don't think so. I think absolute advantage framed as "everything" is an oversimplification of the concept that really matters, which is overwhelming superiority in the hours required to produce stuff.
Do you actually disagree with this idea?
Absolute advantage meaning literally everything would mean China would have NOTHING we would buy from China. In fact, with thousands of items that could be traded
Your link is broken. You need to escape the underscores as "\ _" (without the space).
Thanks. Couldn't fix it by escaping underscores ,instead I made it a hyperlink and escaped the right parenthesis which is part of the link.
Oh, that's weird. It's always worked in the past. Or my memory is foggy. Sorry.
The code that turns things that start with "http colon slash slash" into clickable links doesn't treat Markdown characters like the underscore and the backslash specially. (This is probably meant to be convenient, but I consider it a bug.) It also does not allow close parens in links, which is what messed up the first version of mwengler's link.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is known for the scientific method, which was a key factor in the scientific revolution. Bacon stated that the technologies that distinguished Europe of his day from the Middle Ages were paper and printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass, known as the Four great inventions. The Four great inventions important to the development of Europe were of Chinese origin.[6] Other Chinese inventions included the horse collar, cast iron, an improved plow and the seed drill.