Celebrating 200 years of a deeply unintuitive idea: Comparative advantage
This past week marked the 200th publication anniversary of David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Despite the somnambular title, this book marked the first dissemination of an idea that the mathematical economist and Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson referred to as “the only idea in the social sciences that is both true and non-trivial.” It is also deeply counterintuitive. It is the Principle of Comparative Advantage, the fact that a more efficient p