I don’t understand Eliezer’s explanation. Imagine Alice is hard-working and Bob is lazy. Then Alice can make goods and sell them to Bob. Half the money she’ll spend on having fun, the other half she’ll save. In this situation she’s rich and has a trade surplus, but the other parts of the explanation—different productivity between different parts of Alice (?) and inability to judge her own work fairly (?) - don’t seem to be present.
It doesn’t work at that small of a scale. More generally, this principle doesn’t work on any scale too small to support an international industrial economy. It wouldn’t even work for trade between different tribes of farmers. This is a phenomenon that you only see at very large scales of human behavior. You need massive coordination failures colliding with each other for these ideas to kick in.
I don’t understand Eliezer’s explanation. Imagine Alice is hard-working and Bob is lazy. Then Alice can make goods and sell them to Bob. Half the money she’ll spend on having fun, the other half she’ll save. In this situation she’s rich and has a trade surplus, but the other parts of the explanation—different productivity between different parts of Alice (?) and inability to judge her own work fairly (?) - don’t seem to be present.
It doesn’t work at that small of a scale. More generally, this principle doesn’t work on any scale too small to support an international industrial economy. It wouldn’t even work for trade between different tribes of farmers. This is a phenomenon that you only see at very large scales of human behavior. You need massive coordination failures colliding with each other for these ideas to kick in.