What irks me a little is that work is being allocated to be done by people who are bad at that job. If people who were good at the picking did all the picking collecitvely between the two of them there would be only 300 minutes of work. In the specialization arrangement there is a total of 700 minutes of work. I do wonder whether there is any way of finding an activity that takes between 300/2=150 minutes and 600 minutes to make up for the increased workload of the trading partner (say massage them).
On particular it seems weird that the bananas not being picked on the efficient island are then picked on the inefficient island for 3 times as long. It is also strange that one benefits from poor conditions elsewhere to improve their own situation. It also takes incentive away form alleviating the others poor conditions and maybe even have more trade partners with poor conditions or comparative advantages dissimilar to yourself.
I’d love to see your model—include a value of leisure, which is _NOT_ tradeable. Show your work in how you calculate this value, relative to the value of other resources (note: this request is a trap. It’s likely impossible to agree on private valuation of leisure.)
I very strongly expect that there are arrangements which increase total leisure, but they do not satisfy the requirement that all transfers are voluntary and make all participants better off. They increase the leisure of those bad at their job (and worse at other jobs), but they decrease the leisure of people who are good at their job.
Off course a good that you are not allowed to trade doesn’t have a trade value. The value of leisure is in effect already in play at comparative advantage in that the advantageous position is preferable because I get to the same end state with less time spent ie more leisure. But while I care about my own leisure I don’t typically care about others.
I guess the situation could be expanded in that there is a third good (say canoes), that if we are separate I would not produce for myself and you would not produce for yourself but in contact I could produce it for your consumption. That is if am good in canoes but hate them, but you are bad at canoes but like them. It would just be a situation of aymmetries of production but more equal overall absolute production levels.
There is still the choice that one typically doesn’t choose max leisure time and starving but rather some work and some food. So if you get fruit diet at 100 minutes of work or caviar diet 101 minutes or grass diet with 99 minutes it is hard to pass objective judgement on that. So choices and needs might not be completely separate.
What irks me a little is that work is being allocated to be done by people who are bad at that job. If people who were good at the picking did all the picking collecitvely between the two of them there would be only 300 minutes of work. In the specialization arrangement there is a total of 700 minutes of work. I do wonder whether there is any way of finding an activity that takes between 300/2=150 minutes and 600 minutes to make up for the increased workload of the trading partner (say massage them).
On particular it seems weird that the bananas not being picked on the efficient island are then picked on the inefficient island for 3 times as long. It is also strange that one benefits from poor conditions elsewhere to improve their own situation. It also takes incentive away form alleviating the others poor conditions and maybe even have more trade partners with poor conditions or comparative advantages dissimilar to yourself.
I’d love to see your model—include a value of leisure, which is _NOT_ tradeable. Show your work in how you calculate this value, relative to the value of other resources (note: this request is a trap. It’s likely impossible to agree on private valuation of leisure.)
I very strongly expect that there are arrangements which increase total leisure, but they do not satisfy the requirement that all transfers are voluntary and make all participants better off. They increase the leisure of those bad at their job (and worse at other jobs), but they decrease the leisure of people who are good at their job.
Off course a good that you are not allowed to trade doesn’t have a trade value. The value of leisure is in effect already in play at comparative advantage in that the advantageous position is preferable because I get to the same end state with less time spent ie more leisure. But while I care about my own leisure I don’t typically care about others.
I guess the situation could be expanded in that there is a third good (say canoes), that if we are separate I would not produce for myself and you would not produce for yourself but in contact I could produce it for your consumption. That is if am good in canoes but hate them, but you are bad at canoes but like them. It would just be a situation of aymmetries of production but more equal overall absolute production levels.
There is still the choice that one typically doesn’t choose max leisure time and starving but rather some work and some food. So if you get fruit diet at 100 minutes of work or caviar diet 101 minutes or grass diet with 99 minutes it is hard to pass objective judgement on that. So choices and needs might not be completely separate.