SADLY, the article is behind The Atlantic's paywall, but Clive Crook's essay on the the puzzle of why scepticism about free trade seems to be waxing despite the fact that there is no new theory or evidence undermining the traditional economic consensus on the benefits of trade is worth at least a few minutes loitering in the magazine section of Barnes and Noble.

Mr Crook's essay contains an amusing primer on the lovely and powerful idea of comparative advantage:

[Ricardo] showed that there are mutual gains from trade even when one country is better at producing everything. All that matters is that its margin of superior efficiency is greater for some products than for others. The two countries should still specialise, even on the basis of this comparative advantage—if England is slightly worse than France at making wool, and much worse at making wine, it should specialise in wool and trade. However unproductive a country may be, even if it is uncompetitive across the board, it gains from trade.


I find that people constantly make this mistake in the workplace where "comparative advantage" has become the sort of thing people mouth to sound smarter than they are. "This is not my comparative advantage", a junior employee will say of a (usually onerous) task, meaning, in addition to the fact that he would rather not do it, that there are other things he does better. How management laughs! 

Over at, the science writer Matt Ridley submit's Ricardo's gem as his answer the question "What's your formula?" He explains it with a lucid, simple example that even those of us who have not had the benefit of Paul Samuelson's tutelage can easily grasp:

Even if Iga is better than Og at both fishing and fruit gathering --

-- It takes Og 3 hours to catch a fish and would take 4 hours for him to gather some fruit,

-- While it only takes Iga 1 hour to gather some fruit, and 2 hours to catch a fish,

Then is still pays for Iga to get her fish from Og. She could gather 2 meals of fruit and swap one of them for Og's second fish.

Because that way Iga works only 2 hours for a meal of fruit and fish, instead of 3 if she was self-sufficient, and Og only works 6 hours, instead of 7 if he was self-sufficient. 
