Courtney Love .5 + 2.5 = 3 78 Total BS JOHN GRISHAM SPENDS ALL HIS TIME BASHING THE LAPTOP KEYBOARD AND COUrTNEY SPENDS ALL HER TIME CATERWAULING AND PLINKING GUITAR STRINGS THRILLERS SONGS BS PRODUCTION John Grisham 100 + 0 = 100 Courtney Love 0 + 5 = 5 105 Total BS If John Grisham spends 100 percent of his time inventing dumb adventures for two-dimensional characters and Courtney Love spends 100 percent of her time calling cats, the result will be 100 thrillers and 5 songs for a total Benefit to Society of 105 BS. (Just to make things more confusing, note that Courtney Love loses 40 percent of her productivity by splitting her time between art and music, while John Grisham loses only 25 percent of his productivity. She has the “comparative advantage” in making music because her opportunity costs will be higher if she doesn’t stick to what she does best.) David Ricardo applied the Law of Comparative Advantage to questions of foreign trade. The Japanese make better CD players than we do, and they may be able to make better pop music, but we both profit by buying our CDs from Sony and letting Courtney Love tour Japan. And if she stays there, America has a definite advantage. Comparative advantage is a rare example of the counterintuitive in economics. It’s also unusual because it requires a little arithmetic to understand. We think of economics as strangled in math because of the formulas and graphs filling most economics textbooks. But you can (and I did) search the entire founding volume of economics, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, without encountering a mathematical formula. In New Ideas, Buchholz quotes Alfred Marshall, the preeminent economist of the late nineteenth century (and a mathematician): (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English.
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