Due to the principle of comparative advantage, a country can be rich while being bad at a lot of things (i.e., having an absolute disadvantage in them). This is why richer countries can be worse (even much worse) at handling the coronavirus than some poorer countries. I suspect not realizing or understanding this may have contributed to complacency / insufficient alarm in a lot of people at the beginning of the current pandemic.
It looks like even Larry Summers doesn’t understand comparative advantage. (Alternatively he’s prioritizing virtue signaling over intelligence signaling.)
Thoughts at the end of a long week:
Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?
And then there’s Robert Reich, in a now deleted tweet (archived here):
Average hedge fund down 9% this year so far.
S&P 500 down 24% so far.
No way hedges could do this without inside information.
When this emergency is over, hedge funds must be investigated.
(For those who don’t recognize the names, Larry Summers is “Charles W. Eliot Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard. Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton and the Director of the NEC for President Obama” and Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley and was Secretary of Labor for Clinton.)
Due to the principle of comparative advantage, a country can be rich while being bad at a lot of things (i.e., having an absolute disadvantage in them). This is why richer countries can be worse (even much worse) at handling the coronavirus than some poorer countries. I suspect not realizing or understanding this may have contributed to complacency / insufficient alarm in a lot of people at the beginning of the current pandemic.
It looks like even Larry Summers doesn’t understand comparative advantage. (Alternatively he’s prioritizing virtue signaling over intelligence signaling.)
And then there’s Robert Reich, in a now deleted tweet (archived here):
(For those who don’t recognize the names, Larry Summers is “Charles W. Eliot Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard. Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton and the Director of the NEC for President Obama” and Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley and was Secretary of Labor for Clinton.)