Tag: principles of economics

Put Me Out of a Job – 2

Ashish1 Comment

Let’s begin with the second class today. Your outline mentions the topic “Time Management and Opportunity Cost”. Before we begin the class, outline a definition of both terms, and explain their importance to my life. When you focus on the importance of time management to my life, make sure that you remember I am an eighteen year old. Why should I bother with managing my time? I have my entire life ahead of me – time isn’t a constraint, surely? When then do I need to manage it?
Once you explain your answer to these questions, proceed with the outline as discussed, as per the format I have asked for.

You might think this (time management and opportunity cost) to be a weird topic for a second class in a course called “Principles of Economics”. You would certainly think it to be unconventional. Not the latter half of the topic – opportunity costs – but the first one. What does time management have to do with economics? Well, think of it this way – if you are an Indian student who has learnt economics, you have almost certainly come across Lionel Robbins’ definition, and have most likely memorized it back then.

Here it is: the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

What is more scarce than time? We all have a limited amount of time, and we all have ends to achieve. The ends we would like to achieve in our lives are much more than the time that is afforded to us, and so we must choose which of these ends to pursue, and which to sacrifice. That’s a pretty good, and if you ask me, useful way to understand opportunity costs. The weirdness, or the unconventional choice (to some) of the topic, is a direct consequence of my request to ChatGPT from yesterday’s post:

Optimize for helping me understand the principles and their applicability to various aspects of my life (professional, personal etc), and it is fine if the outline doesn’t match what is usually taught in introductory economics textbooks. Given this, would you like to change your outline in any way? If yes, please show me the new outline. If no, please begin with the first class.

I am seeking to learn economics not to write an examination at the end of the semester in a college or university with this course. I am seeking, instead, to learn economics in order to apply it to various aspects of my life. Of course, as a student enrolled in a university, you may seek to optimize your learning geared towards doing well in a examination at the end of the semester, and that’s fine. Just let ChatGPT know accordingly, that’s all:

A minor tangent before we get back to our course. What if I asked you to change your course outline for these thirty classes to help me write an examination in an Indian undergraduate course? What would the new outline look like? In your answer, show me both outlines together, per lecture. That is, the first line in the description of lecture 1 (out of 30) should be your original lecture, and the second line should be the course tweaked for doing well in an examination, rather than applicability to various aspects of my life. Ditto for the second course, and so on and so forth for all thirty.

I won’t show you the whole output, but simply how the second lecture’s outline has changed:

Here’s a revised outline for the thirty lectures, with the original lectures designed for applicability to various aspects of life (Lecture A) and the modified lectures tailored to help you succeed in an Indian undergraduate economics course (Lecture B):
Lecture A: Time Management and Opportunity Cost
Lecture B: Opportunity Cost: Definition, Types, and Examples

ChatGPT-4’s Output (in part)

I know which one I prefer, and why. The good news, as a student, is that you can do both! Learn in order to score well in an examination, and also learn in order to figure out how to apply economics better in the case of your own life. Why should the two be different? Ah, some questions you should reflect upon, rather than ask ChatGPT.

Anyway, back to our lecture du jour. I asked ChatGPT to explain why it chose time management, and I do not think I would have asked that question as an eighteen year old. The older you get, the more aware you are of how limited your time is. And at least in my own case, the converse is also true. I count this as a mark in my favor – that while a good prompt may get a student going, said student will still need help and advice on an ongoing basis.

So far, at any rate.

Further proof of that fact that I’m not out of a job, just yet, is below. The context is that I read the answer, and felt it to be incomplete. So I prodded it a bit, and then just a little bit more:

I’ve often read the phrase “all costs are opportunity costs”. Please explain what this means. Remember that I know no economics, and as usual, give me one example from the Mahabharata, and one from a real-life situation

My professor wondered why the word “TINSTAAFL” hasn’t come up in your answers yet. I didn’t even know this was a word! Is he joking, or is this word relevant to what you’re telling me right now?

To be clear, it isn’t so much about the phrase TINSTAAFL, as it was about the fact that I felt its explanation to be incomplete. This prompted me (no pun intended) to ask it to be more thorough:

I have an ongoing request. I’m looking to make my professors job as easy as possible, or even make him, in some sense, redundant. Optimize your answer for thoroughness, and if you think you can’t fit all of what you want to say in a single output, end with a line that says, “I can tell you more, please let me know if you’re interested to know even more” This will always be applicable in our conversations.
Now, back to the second lecture’s outline. Expand upon the three sub-points from the broad contours. I am particularly interested in the third one, so give more details, explanations and background in the case of “recognizing and evaluating opportunity costs in decision making”

This is an important lesson in and of itself. Feel free to tell ChatGPT to give more (or less) detail, or ask it to modify how it gives you the answer (more examples | simpler language | write like person X | show your output as a debate between person X and person Y). Get your “teacher” to be the kind of teacher that you like to learn from!

With regard to your explanation of “Recognizing and evaluating opportunity costs in decision-making”, I’m confused about how to think about short term and long term factors while making my choices, and the short term and long term consequences of my choices. How should I think about this, what framework should I use, and is there an underlying principle at work here that I should know about?

I count this as a pretty important miss on ChatGPT’s part. My personal opinion is that you haven’t fully explained opportunity costs without talking about the importance of how your evaluation of opportunity costs changes given different time horizons. Time matters! ChatGPT actually agrees with me (see below), but only after prodding. And this after making explicit the fact that I was interested in learning about time horizons! And so I asked it again:

Is it useful to think of time preference as a separate principle of economics? More broadly speaking, how should a student of economics think about time preferences? Give me answers from a theoretical perspective, but also from an application perspective.

I’m two days in, where I’m the “student” and ChatGPT my teacher. Today’s class wasn’t great. I don’t think ChatGPT’s output was good enough to stand on its own, and it needed additional prompts to deliver what I would consider to be a good introduction to the concept of opportunity costs, its many nuances and its many applications. It wasn’t bad, but it was far from being good, in my opinion.

Should I take this as a sign that I need to get better at writing prompts, or should I take this as a sign that AI isn’t good enough to replace me yet? How should I change my mental model about whether the average student in a typical college can learn better from AI?

If you are a regular reader of EFE, you know what’s coming next: the truth always lies somewhere in the middle.I need to get better at writing prompts, yes, but also AI isn’t good enough to replace me yet. Both of these things will change over time, of course, but for the moment, less than ten percent into the course, I am inclined to think that I am not out of a job, just yet.

And even better, the complements over substitutes argument just got stronger – I’ll be a much better teacher of a course such as this the next time I get to teach it. Tomorrow we tackle “Supply and Demand: Basics and Market Equilibrium”.

I’ll see you in class tomorrow!

Put Me Out of a Job – 1

Ashish2 Comments

Let’s say you’re a student who is going to start learning economics in the coming semester (starting July 2023). Let’s assume that you’ve never learnt economics in a classroom before, save for a brief introduction to it in high school. If you chose to learn from an LLM instead, how should you go about it?

Leave aside for the moment the question of whether you should be doing so or not. The question I seek to answer over many blog posts is whether you can do so or not. Whether or not this is a good idea for you depends in part on my abilities to add to the value that an LLM generates for you from such a course. And once these thirty (yes, thirty) blog posts are written out, I’ll write about my thoughts about whether a student still needs me in a classroom or not.

My current thinking is that I would still be needed. How much of this is hope, and how much dispassionate analysis is difficult to say right now. For that reason, I would like to tackle this problem at the end of this exercise. For the moment, I want to focus on helping you learn economics by teaching you how to learn it yourself, without the need for a human teacher (online or offline).

In each post, I’ll give you a series of prompts for that particular class. I will not always give you the output of these prompts – feel free to run them as they are, word for word, or tweak them as per your likes, fancies and hobbies.

My motivation in this series is twofold. One, to find out for myself just how much better ChatGPT is than me at teaching you principles of economics. Second, to help all of you realize that you ought to hold all your professors (myself included!) to a higher standard in the coming year. We have to do a better job than AI alone can, along all dimensions – let’s find out if we can.

Buckle up, here we go.

Here’s my first prompt:

Remember, LLM’s work best when you give really detailed prompts. Note the following:

  1. I began by giving some information about myself – my limitations as regards economics, where in the world I come from, and what my interests/hobbies/passions are.
  2. I specified what I’m looking to learn from the LLM.
  3. I specified the quantum of output required (thirty classes).
  4. I specified how broad the output should be.
  5. I specified how I would like the answer to be customized for me
    • I would like to learn about economics by relating it to what I like to read about in any case (use examples from the Mahabharata)
    • I would like to learn about economics by relating it to real life situations.
    • It is amazing to me, regardless of how many times I experience it, that it “gets” what I really mean in spite of having phrased my question using really bad grammar.
    • The specific examples aren’t the point, the idea is the point. Learn calculus by relating it to mandala art, for example. Learn history by relating it to dance forms. Learn geography by relating it to food from different parts of the world. A teacher in a classroom cannot possibly do this for all the students, because of the size of the class, and because a teacher cannot possibly know your hobby in as much detail as you can. Make good use of AI!
  6. Should the examples from the Mahabharata be chosen for how prominent the examples were in the text, or should they be chosen for their relevance to economics? My preference is for the latter, and I made sure the LLM knows this. Ditto for the real life examples.
  7. I ended with a meta-prompt, that will stay true for the next thirty (or more questions) – ask if I need to learn more, and only then proceed with the next class.

Should you copy this prompt, word for word? Of course not! For one, you may not want to learn economics, but rather a different subject. The underlying principles still holds. You may not like to read about the Mahabharata, for another. You may want only ten lectures, not thirty. Or you may want two hundred! Feel free to tweak the prompt to suit your requirements, but it helps to “get” how to go about thinking about the structure of the prompts. That’s the point.

I took a look at the outline of the thirty course lecture series it prepared for me, and it was not bad at all. But I had a follow-up request:

Now, you might think that you need to know economics in order to judge the output, and tweak your request. And sure, you’re right that it will help. But regardless, even if you cannot judge the quality of the output, surely you know enough about what and how you want to learn. My apologies for going all meta on you, but if you don’t know enough about the supply side of the market, surely you know what you would like as a consumer – at least in part. So feel free to help the LLM become a better teacher by telling it more about you.

It went ahead and gave me the refined output, and also the broad contours of the first class. Here are the broad contours of the first class:

Again, note that I am quite excited about how this class is shaping up, because if economics is, indeed, the study of how to get the most out of life, Arjuna’s choice to fight in the Kurukshetra war is an awesome way to get some really thought-provoking questions in for discussion. But this may not be your cup of tea – so feel free to brew your own cuppa of econ, by customizing it to what you like the most (Avengers? Cricket? RRR? Bharatnatyam? Junk food? Anime? Go for it!)

I did have follow-up questions:

And based upon its answer to this prompt, I had yet another clarificatory question:

Note that your conversation will be (I would go so far as to say should be) different. You will have different questions, different prompts, different things that make you curious. And that’s not just fine, that is the whole point. Depending on how carefully you read its output, and depending on how probing and detailed your questions are, you can keep just this first class going for a long, long time. How long? That’s up to you!

Here are two examples:

You can, of course, ask it to answer any (or all) of these five questions. Ask it to create ten (or twenty, or a hundred) instead – and as a student, assume that this is how us professors might well be “coming up” with questions for your tests, assignments and exams.

Here are more, and note how they get wilder (more random?) with each passing question:

In each of these cases, you don’t have to have trust in, or agree with, the answer given by the LLM. Treat the output as a way to get you to think more deeply, to challenge what has been said, to verify that the answers are correct, and to have further discussions with your peers and with your (human) teachers, whoever they may be.

Note to myself (and to other teachers of an introductory course about the principles of economics):

  1. How can we do a better job than this in the classroom…
    • Without using AI (we’re substitutes)?
    • By using AI (we’re complements)?
  2. What is missing from the LLM’s output (this is assuming you’ve tried these prompts or their variants)?
  3. What stops us from recommending that students do this in class on their own devices, and we observe, nudge and discuss some of the more interesting output with everybody? That is, how does teaching change in the coming semester?

Feedback is always welcome, but in the case of the next thirty posts, I think it is especially important. So please, do let me know what you think!

India’s Institutions and Reasoning Using Principles of Economics

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Shruti Rajagopalan has an excellent post out on Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification from the Lok Sabha. We live in polarized times, so it is inevitable that you will read this post (and her post) with your mind already made up on whether she is right or wrong. Thankfully, neither Shruti’s take on the issue, nor your opinion on Shruti’s take on the issue, is what I want to write about today. My post is, instead, on how a student of economics ought to think about this issue. Your conclusions from your thoughts, and whether they agree with your instincts, is a separate issue.

India’s situation is more a slow growing cancer that is infecting everything. India’s illiberal laws, a biased judicial decision and the Indian Supreme Court’s flawed guidelines on legislative disqualification, created a situation ripe for political opportunism. Consequently, Om Birla, the partisan speaker of the Lok Sabha, from the ruling BJP, has exploited his discretionary powers to disqualify the opposition leader.

https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/did-modi-kill-indias-democracy-by

“Murder of democracy” and “The law followed its own course, so what’s the problem here?” are the two usual, and entirely predictable reactions from both sides of our shrill spectrum. I would encourage you to enlarge the frame of your analysis if you are a student of economics. You very well may (and as a citizen of this country, you should) have an opinion on what has transpired, but as a student of economics, begin where Shruti does. She begins, I’d say, by making two points. First, that institutions matter. And second, that our Indian institutions are in slow decay.

The first of these points is well understood by watching this video:

I’m not saying we live in North Korea, and I’m not saying we live in South Korea. The video tries to help you understand the point that for any country’s development, institutions matter. This point is made in this video by using the extreme example (as Tyler mentions more than once) of North and South Korea. Over time, countries with institutions that exist and function well will do better than countries without institutions, or those with institutions that do not function well.

What does “well” mean in this context? Well, that depends on what you are optimizing for. And in this case, we should be optimizing for having institutions that make India a better place. What does the word “better” mean in this case? Ah, what a can of worms that is!

But regardless of where you find yourself on The Great Polarization Spectrum, hopefully you will agree with me that India’s institutions do not run as well as they might. This is not about pre- and post- 2014. This is about viewing India’s institutions independent of which government is or has been in charge, and their (the governments’) causal impacts on the quality of India’s institutions. A simple question: do you think India’ institutions are perfect? If no, as a student of economics, you would do well to ask why, and you would do well to think of how they could be made better. Your definition of the word “better” is a function of what you think India should be optimizing for, of course.

Shruti asks more than a few questions in her posts, and answers them. You may wholeheartedly agree, or wholeheartedly disagree with her answers. The reason you will find yourself in extreme agreement (or disagreement) with her take is because of the consonance of your definition of the word “better” with her implicit definition of that word. But ignore, for the moment, her answer and yours. Let’s ask ourselves if we agree with the questions she has raised. Here they are:

  1. Does India become a better place because we have criminal defamation in India?
    Note that your answer shouldn’t be a function of this specific case. That is, you might be tempted to say “No!”, if you are a Rahul Gandhi acolyte. Or you might be tempted to say “Yes!” because you are a Narendra Modi acolyte. Both approaches are wrong. Regardless of the specifics of the current issue, and as a matter of principle, does the existence of criminal defamation make India better or worse? Whatever your answer, why? I’m not going to answer this question for you, nor should you ask anybody else to answer it for you. Read the relevant section from Shruti’s post, and try and figure out the answer for yourself.
  2. Does the disqualification of Members of Parliament because they have been convicted of a crime make India a better place?
    I’m going to sound like a broken record, but note that your answer shouldn’t be a function of this specific case. That is, you might be tempted to say “No!”, if you are a Rahul Gandhi acolyte. Or you might be tempted to say “Yes!” because you are a Narendra Modi acolyte. Both approaches are wrong. Regardless of the specifics of the current issue, and as a matter of principle, does the 2013 judgment by the Supreme Court make India better or worse? Whatever your answer, why? I’m not going to answer this question for you, nor should you ask anybody else to answer it for you. Read the relevant section from Shruti’s post, and try and figure out the answer for yourself.
    As a student of economics, note her use of economic reasoning in two different places in this section too. Here’s the first, and here’s the second.
    Are you confused about how the second is economic reasoning? She’s saying that incentives matter, and that this rule can be misused by a trigger happy Indian executive. Again, note that this is not about the specifics of the issue at hand. Regardless of who is in charge and who is in the opposition, how should we think about this issue in principle? Whatever your answer, why?
  3. How much power should the speaker of the union and state legislatures have?
    I’m once again going to sound like a broken record, and you know the drill by now. Here’s the relevant link.

My point in this post is to encourage you to do more of long term, principles based thinking.

  1. Get better at separating out the specifics of the issue, and learn how to uncover the underlying principle.
  2. Learn how to think about these principles in the abstract, and when doing so, learn to think about the long term consequences.
    • If you are confused about how “long term” you should be thinking, my suggestion would be to use the thumb rule that a little more long term than your current line of thinking is always a good idea.
  3. Learn to think about what the word “better” means to you, when you try and think about the answer to the question “How should we go about making India a better place?”
    • Always remind yourself of pt. 2 above while thinking through this question. Guard against the temptation to not do so.
  4. Learn to ask more often why other people have different definitions of the word “better”, and learn how to not be dismissive of their definitions. Always ask what might be the strongest arguments for their definition, and learn how to argue against those strongest definitions. This necessitates being a very good student of history, of culture and of philosophy. That’s a lot of hard work, and you’ll never be perfect at it.

But as a citizen of a country, any country, what else is there to do.

No?

On Bryan Caplan’s Question

AshishLeave a comment

Bryan Caplan asked an interesting question on Twitter the other day:

I’m not sure if you can see what I voted for, but I am fairly sure you could have guessed!

But if you think about it a little bit, it’s actually not all that easy to answer this question. As with all good questions, there are nuances and layers. First, I asked my excellent research assistant to tell me more about what the phrase “epistemic value” might mean:

The phrase “epistemic value” refers to the degree to which a belief or piece of information contributes to our knowledge or understanding of the world. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the nature and scope of knowledge, and epistemic value is a term that is often used in discussions within this field.
Beliefs or pieces of information that have high epistemic value are those that are reliable, accurate, and well-supported by evidence. Conversely, beliefs or pieces of information that have low epistemic value are those that are unreliable, inaccurate, or poorly supported by evidence.
In general, beliefs or pieces of information that have high epistemic value are more valuable to us than those that have low epistemic value, because they are more likely to help us understand the world and make well-informed decisions.

https://chat.openai.com/chat

I’ve always thought of the word epistemic as ‘ about knowledge’, or ‘about knowing’. And the phrase ‘epistemic value’ seems to be – as expected – very similar. But that phrase in the first sentence of my RA’s answer is worth thinking about a little bit: ‘the degree to which a belief or piece of information contributes to our knowledge or understanding of the world’.

Now that makes the answer to Bryan’s question more difficult! To the extent that the top empirical papers of the last 5-10 years have been written using economic principles (and I see no reason to assume that this is not the case), they end up telling us more about the world than the principles that they have used. This has literally got to be true by definition.

They might tell us conditions under which, for a given geography and a given time period, these principles are upheld (or not). They might quantify the relationship between two variables, again for a given geography and a given time period. They might explain apparent violations of these principles, and explain why such phenomena occur.

To give you a simple, but completely hypothetical example – imagine a paper that examines how people change their consumption patters in the face of high inflation in America in the year 2021. That wouldn’t make it a ‘top empirical econ paper’ of course – but leave that be for the moment. Standard econ theory will predict that consumers will respond to changing prices by changing their patterns of consumption (more fillers in your burger patties rather than only meat, for example). And this hypothetical paper of ours not only confirms this, but also quantifies it for a geography (USA) for a particular time period (2021).

But that would mean that the epistemic value of this paper is actually more than the wisdom of standard intro econ textbooks. Because your standard econ text will tell you that this will happen, but the textbook will be unable to tell you the extent to which this will be true for a given country for a given time period. That ‘piece of information’ re: the extent is an addition to the knowledge that we get from a standard econ text, and so by definition the paper has more epistemic value.

Whoops. I chose the first option in Bryan’s tweet, and it would seem that I am wrong.

Or am I?

For the year 2021, for the nation of the United States of America, the epistemic value of that paper is higher than the wisdom of a standard intro econ textbook. But the wisdom of the standard econ intro text will apply to all other geographies in the world in the year 2021, and will apply for all geographies for all years to come.

The paper wins in the specific, but becomes by definition inapplicable in the case of the general.

Time to roll out one of my favorite guns from my arsenal:

What are you optimizing for?

If you want more epistemic value for a given space and a given time, option 3 from Bryan’s tweet. If you want more epistemic value in general, option 1 from Bryan’s tweet.

And for having written this post, my own answer still remains option 1, but this post helps me understand that I should ask one of my favorite questions more often.

What say you?

Why is it bad to be rich?

AshishLeave a comment

Navin asked this question on Twitter recently:

(My thanks to Mihir Mahajan for pointing the tweet out to me, and for requesting for a post on this topic)

My current plan is to answer this question over three posts. In today’s post, I’ll try and answer this question using a first principles approach. That is, without using Google, or ChatGPT3, or my notes and references, I’ll answer this question using nothing more than what I think are the basic, foundational principles of economics.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll trawl through the internet (and make use of ChatGPT3), and throw in articles/blog posts I’ve bookmarked over the years that speak to this point. And finally, in the post the day after tomorrow, I’ll speak about books you might want to read about this topic.

But even before having written down a single word re: my first principles argument, here is my answer in short: it is wonderful to be rich.

Six principles, if you ask me, that you absolutely must learn if you are a student of economics (and note that whether you like it or not, everybody is a student of economics):

  1. Incentives Matter
  2. TINSTAAFL
  3. Trade Matters
  4. Costs Matter
  5. Prices Matter
  6. Externalities Matter

As I was telling somebody the other day, most – if not all – problems in economics can be thought of using these six principles. If you truly understand these six principles and all of what they imply, you will be able to reduce every economic problem you meet down to the application of these six principles. The applications may be nuanced, there may be more than one principle applicable, and you may have to supply a lot of caveats. But you’ll go a very long way towards tackling your problem of choice by starting with these six principles.

And I’ll fire my first salvo at Navin’s question by deploying the third principle in the list: trade matters.

People get rich by trading with other people. Sure, people have gotten rich in the past (and in some cases, even today) by expropriating property, through loot and through dacoity. But I hope you don’t think I’m ducking the issue by saying that’s not the focus of today’s post. My focus in today’s post is about people who get rich through peaceful, voluntary trade. This particular process of getting rich focuses on offering you, through entirely peaceful, non-coercive means, a trade.

You are free to evaluate the terms of this trade, and if they seem agreeable to you, you enter into this trade. Note that the only reason you do is because you think that doing so is to your advantage. You are better off for having done this trade, relative to the option of not doing so. And the person who offered this trade to you is presumably better off for you taking the other end of it, for why else would she have offered you this trade instead?

That’s a non zero sum game, and the more we play such games with each other, the better off we are. That’s what the principle of “Trade Matters” means, and that is what it entails: peaceful, voluntary trade leaves both parties better off, and the world is therefore better off for this trade having gone through. If, as a consequence, both parties get richer, that’s A Very Good Thing, and it is therefore good to be rich.

But remember that for some problems, the applications of these principles may be nuanced, and that there may be more than one principle applicable.

First, opportunity costs. TINSTAAFL stands for There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and even to a non-zero sum game, opportunity costs are very much applicable. In the context of international trade, your level of analysis matters. Trade might make sense at the level of the parties involved in the trade, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody else is better off as a consequence:

Because in the case of trade between countries, as opposed to trade between individuals, there are people who will lose out. If a university in the United States of America hires me to teach online classes to the students over there, there isn’t a hypothetical amateur cook who is losing out. There is an actual person in that country who could have taught this course, but is no longer able to because of me.
The university that hired me is better off, because it is able to hire the services of a teacher for less money. To the extent that I do about as good a job as the person I replaced, the students are (at least) indifferent. And given how strong the dollar is, I am certainly better off!
But it is not enough to say that both parties in this trade are better off (I and the university). A complete economic analysis should also include the person in the USA who is out of a job, and I would argue that one should also include what I find myself unable to do here in India as a consequence of teaching that course abroad. Both of these are the opportunity costs of this trade, and a complete economic analysis should include these aspects as well

.https://econforeverybody.com/2023/01/10/so-no-one-loses-when-it-comes-to-trade-rightright-part-ii/

Trade might then, at the margin, cause an increase in inequality. You’d be surprised at how old (but still somewhat underrated) an idea this is, but the opportunity cost of more trade might well imply an increase in inequality. So you might well say that it is bad to be rich because the opportunity cost of you being rich is that somebody else is (comparatively) poor.

But be careful with how you proceed with this! It cuts both ways, this analysis. Is the opportunity cost of reducing inequality a reduction in the creation of wealth? When you attempt to reduce inequality by taxing the rich, you reduce their incentive to trade. And remember, they get rich by voluntarily trading with you, and if that trade leaves you better off, you’ve made yourself poorer in the bargain.

If you tax Amazon so much that Amazon decides it is better for them to shutter up altogether, have you made the world better off or worse off? I’d urge you to ignore your first, visceral take, and take a look at your Amazon app to find out how often you’ve ordered from Amazon in the past month before answering this question.

So I’d argue that it still is good to be rich – but it ain’t for free. But in my opinion, the price is worth it. One can, and one should, argue about what the appropriate level of taxation should be. One can, and one should, worry about tactics used by Amazon to make sure that they remain a monopoly provider of certain goods and services. One can, and one should, worry about whether Amazon pushes its employees a little bit too much. I’m not defending Amazon as a perfect company without flaws. But I very much am saying that the world is a better place because Amazon exists. There are costs that we bear for having Amazon in our midst, but those costs are worth it.

And I picked Amazon as a stereotypical example here, but the argument is about the underlying idea, not about the specific organization. Trade matters, even after acknowledging that there are opportunity costs involved with trade.

We’re trading right now, you and I. You’re paying me with that most precious of all commodities in the year 2023: attention. And I can’t begin to thank you enough for having given me your attention so far, because I know that reading this ain’t easy. Pleasurable, hopefully, and worth your while – but not easy. And you’ve chosen to continue to pay me with your attention because what you’re getting in return – the pleasure you feel in tackling my arguments – is worth your while.

But how do you know that it is worth your while? You could have been doing something else with this time. You could have been learning how to code. You could have finished at least part of some project or an assignment. You could have picked strawberries. You could have milked a cow.

The point is that you could have been doing something that actually earns you cold hard cash, instead of reading this article. And it is your assessment of your own opportunity costs that allow you to continue reading this article. You know that you can ‘afford’ to spare the time required to read this article.

But how do you know this? You know it because you are part of a national (and global) economic system that depends upon the principle that ‘prices matter’.You have at least an implicit valuation of how much a minute of your time is worth, and you have made the rational decision to ‘spend’ this time reading this blog.

What is my point? My point is that we know how much it costs to enter into a trade only if we know how much that trade is worth to us, and we only know how much a trade is worth to us by having a sense of what we’re worth to society. Trade matters is a principle that works only if we know the price of a good or a service, and we know the price of a good or a service best in a free market economy. Deciding how much to produce something, and deciding at what price to sell it is a truly difficult problem to solve in an economy that is not based on markets.

So yes, trade matters, but so do prices.

But speaking of prices, it gets trickier still.

  1. What if you set prices to not just lure the buyer into buying your product, but at a price which is so attractive to buyers that your competitors cannot afford to match it? What if they go out of business as a consequence, leaving you as the only game in town? What if you then raise prices?
  2. What if you use patents to make sure that others cannot sell the same goods that you are selling? What if you abuse the patenting process to stymie the competition? What if you then become the only game in town, and raise prices to eye-watering levels?
  3. What if the price at which you sell the product you are selling does not take into account the damage done to the environment?
  4. What if the buyer isn’t aware of further purchases she might need to make for having bought your goods? What if she realizes later that the true price of the good in question is much higher?
  5. What if the buyer is tempted into buying the product because of shady marketing techniques?
  6. What if you lobby with the government to make sure that nobody else but you can sell the product that you’re selling? Will you then be able to charge a higher price?

Each of these questions merits a much deeper exploration than is possible in this blogpost (for those who are interested, or wondering, here are the topics you want to think about in the case of those six questions: monopoly | propoerty rights and patents | externalities | asymmetry of information | microeconomics/ behavioral economics | public economics). These topics would just be the start, there are many nuances to consider in each of the six questions. But for having raised these six questions, and the two separate arguments I’ve made in the last two sections above, here is my answer to Navin’s question about why it is bad to be rich:

It is bad to be rich if you live in a world without a fully operative price system, and/or a world in which non-voluntary trades can take place.

Interpret that sentence however you like, but begin to worry if you are convinced that there is only one interpretation, or if you are convinced that your interpretation is the only correct one!

I write on this blog for many reasons, but chief among them is a very personal reason. I would like my thinking, and my writing, to be become clearer and better over time. I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say that there are days on which I think I succeed in this endeavor, and there are days on which I don’t. But taken as a whole, I am convinced that I am a better thinker and writer than I was in 2016, which is when I started this blog.

Far from perfect, in case it needs to be said, but the benchmark isn’t perfection, the benchmark is Ashish of 2016. And on any given day, it is the Ashish of the previous day. One day at a time, as it were.

And one thing that has happened over these past six years is that I have become better at distilling in my own head what economics ultimately comes down to. Six microeconomic principles, and three big picture questions. I have outlined the six principles above, and I have written about the three big picture questions before, but here they are once again:

  1. What does the world look like?
  2. Why does it look the way it does?
  3. What can we do to make the world a better place?

Students who have learnt from me these past six years will be familiar with this list. But there is a crucial component that is missing in this list of six principles and three big picture questions: time. On my blog, I have attempted to get around this problem by speaking of an alternative framework, which I have shortened in my head to the CHIC acronym: Choices, Horizons, Incentives and Costs:

The trouble is, our brain isn’t always the best at interpreting incentives correctly, which brings us to the third key concept in economics: horizons. Or, if you have had enough nerd talk for one day, we could also call it the instant gratification monkey problem. Call it what you will, the problem is that we tend to prioritize choices that payoff in the short run, but create problems in the long run. If you’ve ever had that last “one for the road” drink, or ended up actually eating that second dessert (and who hasn’t?), you don’t really need an explanation for this. We tend to choose those options that payoff over the short horizon, and ignore the long term consequences.

https://econforeverybody.com/2018/05/03/choices-costs-horizons-and-incentives/

I have also written about time, and how it is ever-so-confusing to think about it in the context of economics. In my classes, I show students the circular flow of income diagram, and once they’ve understood it, I ask them to think of it as a video, rather than a still picture. That is to say, time matters.

Time matters.

Go and read the responses that Navin got on his original question on Twitter. I sent this essay that you are reading right not to some people, and they highlighted this same problem – they thought of intergenerational problems about being rich. Inheritance and the perpetuation of inequality across time, for example. Almost the entirety of my blogpost tomorrow, where I will share many articles that answer Navin’s question, focusses on this issue.

So here’s a question I have been grappling with for a while: should I update my list of six principles (Incentives matter | TINSTAAFL | Trade Matters | Costs Matter | Prices Matter | Externalities Matter) to also include Time Matters? And if yes, how do I expound upon this principle?

Here’s another way of thinking about this issue – one of my objectives on this blog is to teach economics to anybody and everybody. So ask yourself this question – what do we need to do to simplify economics down to its absolute bare minimum? Will somebody who has learnt about economics by attending my classes, or reading my blog, be able to answer Navin’s question? And the short answer to this question is yes, they will. But in an incomplete fashion, because in the context of this question (and many others besides), time matters.

Time, as it turns out, really and truly matters. And for me to teach this principles, I need to try and understand it better myself.

Onwards!

NAAC Visits and the G20

Ashish1 Comment

There is much angst in Pune, about how little time it took for Senapati Bapat Road to look really, really nice.

The G20 summit in Pune concluded recently, and the transformation of the surroundings near where the summit was held was a sight to behold. Neat red markings for a bicycle lane on either side of the road, immaculately painted dividers, spruced up lamp-poles, jazzed up signals, pretty little lights dangling from the many trees that line this road, lovely flowers planted along the median, and a thorough Potemkin-ization of anything deemed even remotely non-presentable – everything was achieved with a speed and efficiency that is scarcely believable.

Although as a true-blue Puneri, it gladdens my heart ever so much to realize that some things will never, ever change:

But this unbelievable improvement in efficency, I’d argue, is very familiar to students who have been in college/University when the NAAC committee has come a-visitin’. It’s the same kind of transformation, and it is equally unbelievable. Flower-pots will appear near entrances, walls will be given a fresh coat of paint, friendly signages will pop up all over campus, washrooms will positively gleam with cleanliness, and the entire campus will look brand new.

Incentives matter.

What happens if you as a citizen complain about, say, a lack of footpaths? You are issued a token, not a footpath. What happens if you as a citizen ask the PMC to repair some broken down traffic signals? You know the answer by now. What happens if those broken down signals are on a road that will be noticed by the G20 dignitaries?

It’s not so much the priority that is missing, which is the only thing I’d correct in Amit’s tweet. What’s missing is the incentive to do the best job possible – when it is the citizens that are doing the belly-aching. When it is the people holding the purse-strings, or the people who call the shots that send along gentle reminders – well, the incentive is clearly present, no?

And that’s why campuses will look their resplendent best during NAAC visits, and that’s why Senapati Bapat Road looks as pretty as it does right now.

Because, alas, incentives matter.

Old timers who have been staying in Sus village for years will regale you with stories of how roads become as smooth as silk literally overnight come the month of December, year after year. It’s the same ol’ story, with the same ol’ underlying reason: incentives matter.

Which begs the question: how can we get the incentives of the PMC to be aligned with our interests? Answering the question is easy. Implementing it? Ah, that is beyond the scope of this blog, for now.

Also, note that this has nothing to do with the BJP, or the Congress, or AAP, or indeed with any Indian political party. We aren’t unique as a nation in this regard, and no political party in our country is uniquely good (or bad) in this regard. All political parties in all nations are staffed with members of the same species that you and I belong to, and we all respond in much the same way to incentives. So please, don’t attack or defend whichever political party you have in mind.

One good thing about the principles of economics is that they work the same way on everybody, everywhere. The sooner we realize this, the better it will be for all of us.

Happy New Year

AshishLeave a comment

Many years ago, and this happened soon after our daughter was born, my wife and I finally got a chance to go out on a date. Our daughter, we felt, was now old enough for us to be able to step out of the house for a while.

Lunch and a movie was the plan.

Lunch was very good indeed, both the meal itself, and the rare ol’ pleasure of being able to enjoy each other’s company in diaper-less surroundings. And then we went for the movie.

And that, unfortunately, explains the title of today’s post.

For the movie that we chose that day has the same title as does this post.

And it was an abomination of a movie.

It is difficult to put into words exactly how bad it was, for I don’t remember much of it (which is a blessing, I suppose). Within the first five minutes or so, it became painfully clear that this movie was going to be a complete dud. We could have sat outside in the lobby instead, and it would have been a better use of our time. We could have gone up and down the escalators in the mall that we saw the movie in for three hours, and that would have been a better use of our time. We could, in short, have done absolutely anything else for those three hours, and it would have been a better use of our time.

And yet, in spite of knowing this with the kind of crystal clear certainty that is rarely afforded to us humans, we still sat through the entirety of that – for lack of a better word – movie.

Not our proudest moment, especially because both of us have PhD’s in economics – we clearly fell prey to the sunk cost fallacy.

What is the sunk cost fallacy?

Rather than share the Wikipedia page about the topic, as I would have done until now, I asked our new overlord its opinion on the matter:

https://chat.openai.com/chat

We’ve got the chance to come out on a date after such a long time, we figured. Who knows when we’ll get another opportunity like this? We shouldn’t waste it. That’s how our reasoning went.

Failing to realize, of course, that watching that damn thing was the most horrible waste of our time. As I’ve already mentioned, we could have done just about anything else with the time that we had, and we would have been better off. But as ChatGPT3 so smugly told me, our “tendency to justify continued investment in a decision based on the amount of resources already invested” is what caused our downfall.

And that’s the tricky thing about the sunk cost fallacy. Explaining it is easy, and understanding it is easy. Applying it? Ah, that’s the difficult bit. And it happens to the very best of us!

I drove to the store last night only to find on arrival that I had forgotten my wallet. I returned home frustrated and ready to veg out in front of the tv. It occured to me, however, that my earlier trip was a sunk cost. If the trip was worthwhile the first time it must be worthwhile to return (not so much time had passed as to change the utility of the calculation). I still felt frustrated and I didn’t really want to return but I forced myself to behave like a rational utility maximizer. As I headed back, however, I felt better. Reason and emotion cohered once again as the sunk cost became psychologically sunk.
Score one for economics. A sunk cost is only sunk if you choose to ignore it and economics helps us to do this. But note to self: have more sympathy for students who find the economic way of thinking to be unnatural. Often, they are right.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/12/behaving_like_a.html

(Something I found myself wondering about while I was pasting this blogpost here. Note that the extract above is the entire blogpost! Woud this blogpost have been written at all in the age of Twitter? Were we better off then, or are we better off now? Along which dimensions? But anyway, back to our regular programming.)

But let me go back to the point about explaining and understanding sunk costs being “easy”. Is it, really? What are you optimizing for when you “succumb” to the sunk cost fallacy?

What if you choose to finish a task in spite of knowing that it isn’t “worth it”? Are you necessarily an “irrational” person? What if you choose to finish the task to make a point? What if making the point matters more than succeeding at said task? What if attempting to complete a task is more about signaling to others about the kind of person one is? Would this then still be a fallacy?

Many years ago, Tyler Cowen wrote a blogpost about the sunk cost fallacy (in fact, a response to Alex Tabbarok’s post excerpted above), and had this quote within it:

One might prefer that, if others have made significant sacrifices in attempting to realize some valuable state of affairs S, then their sacrifices not be in vain. That is, one might prefer that these sacrifices causally contribute to the realization of some valuable state of affairs…Interestingly, one sometimes is in a position to determine, by one’s own actions, whether the past efforts of others will have been in vain. This is true, for example, when it is within one’s power to finish some valuable project in whose service others have labored, but which they are now not in a position to complete. Let us say that when one acts so as to prevent the past efforts of others from having been in vain one redeems those efforts.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/03/when_is_it_rati.html

What does this mean, exactly? Consider this:

Dus is a 2005 Indian Hindi-language action thriller film directed by Anubhav Sinha, based on the lives of seven fictional SIT (Indian Special Investigation) Team officers. It stars Sanjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty, Abhishek Bachchan, Zayed Khan, Shilpa Shetty, Esha Deol, Dia Mirza and Raima Sen.
Dus is a tribute to late celebrated director Mukul S. Anand, who had died while filming the incomplete 1997 film of the same title, which starred Dutt and Shetty with Salman Khan. It was a critical and commercial success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dus

I have not seen Dus, and I don’t know if it was “the realization of some valuable state of affairs”. But if one is able to determine, by one’s own actions, whether the past efforts of others will have been in vain, what then? It might be the right thing to make sure that “their sacrifices not be in vain”. Honoring somebody’s memory – is that a sunk cost fallacy or not?

Maybe it is not so easy, after all, to explain and understand the sunk cost fallacy.

Has it been all a waste of time then, I writing this post and you reading it?

Ah well, in any case, Happy New Year to all of you!

So No One Loses When It Comes to Trade, Right?…Right?! Part II

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Actually, there is somebody who loses out in the case of the cook coming to work at our place.

But for this story to make sense, please first read last Friday’s post, and then yesterday’s post. I’ll wait, there’s no hurry. Done? All right, here we go.

So, as I was saying, there is somebody who loses out in that little story. Who? The amateur cook inside of me. That part of my personality loses out, given the fact that I’m optimizing for my income. Society rewards me more for boring people about economics than it does for me cooking meals for my family. In order to maximize my family’s income, I spend more time boring people about economics, and less time on practicing my cooking skills.

The more time I spend boring people about economics, the better I get at this skill. The less time I spend in cooking up delicious meals for my family, the worse I get at that skill. And so over time, I become a (hopefully!) better teacher of economics, and not as good a cook as I might have been.

And so, as I said, the amateur cook in me loses out in this trade. Or put another way – and if you are an economist reading this, you were probably getting impatient for me to say this – the opportunity cost of being an econ teacher is not being an amteur cook at home.

But this is exactly why international trade is such a political hot potato! Because in the case of trade between countries, as opposed to trade between individuals, there are people who will lose out. If a university in the United States of America hires me to teach online classes to the students over there, there isn’t a hypothetical amateur cook who is losing out. There is an actual person in that country who could have taught this course, but is no longer able to because of me.

The university that hired me is better off, because it is able to hire the services of a teacher for lesser money. To the extent that I do about as good a job as the person I replaced, the students are (at least) indifferent. And given how strong the dollar is, I am certainly better off!

But it is not enough to say that both parties in this trade are better off (I and the university). A complete economic analysis should also include the person in the USA who is out of a job, and I would argue that one should also include what I find myself unable to do here in India as a consequence of teaching that course abroad. Both of these are the opportunity costs of this trade, and a complete economic anlaysis should include these aspects as well.

Even if you were to include this analysis, it still makes sense to go ahead with this trade. It isn’t for free (TINSTAAFL) – that is to say, there are opportunity costs, but even so, the world as a whole is better off.

But how diffused/concentrated are the gains from this trade in both countries? The dollar value of this trade – the gains from trade – might be such that the parties who are a part of this trade are better off. But is the number of people who are better off more than the number of people who are worse off?

Don’t think about this in the context of my examplein this blogpost. What about in the case of importing cheap Chinse goods into India? What about in the case of India exporting software to America? What about in the case of cheap textiles being imported into India from Bangaldesh? Are the dollar gains in case of such trade concentrated, and are the number of people unemployed more diffuse?

And if so, should we just shrug and say that this is the cost of doing business? Or should we institute a form of government that seeks to redistribute the gains from international trade? How well might such a scheme work – does our understanding of governments and their performance the world over fill us with optimism that they can perform this task efficiently?

More: who is likely to have a louder voice in public discourse? Will it be the people who gain from trade, or the people who lose from trade? Who is the government therefore more likely to listen to? Should we therefore abandon international trade altogether? What role should academicians play in this discourse? What role do they play in this discourse?

And it is this that makes the study of international trade so very fascinating. The realization that trade is a Very Good Thing, but that at the same time it is Definitely Not Without Costs. Increasing international trade, while minimizing the damage done to the domestic economy is the tightrope that many countries have walked in the past, and not all of them have been successful all the time. Throw into the mix cultural factors, political pressures and environmental concerns, and you have the recipe for an extremely fertile field of study.

But if you have thought that international trade is just plain awesome, with no downsides, you’re wrong. And if you’ve thought that international trade is just plain horrible, with no upsides, you’re wrong. Getting both sides to talk to each other, and figuring out where exactly we should be on the Say Only No To Trade – Say Only Yes To Trade spectrum is an ongoing battle that will never end.

Enjoy the ride, for what else is there to do?

So No One Loses When It Comes to Trade, Right?…*Right?!*

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Friday’s post taught us that trade is a good thing, and that more trade makes us better off.

The magical part is that it makes both parties better off:

This is what economists mean when they say that trade is a non-zero sum game. Trade leaves both parties better off. Both parties in this “game” win. No one loses.
And this is a surprisingly counter-intuitive idea. Sports teaches us that for one side to win, the other has to lose. Sure, draws are possible in sports, but read the sentence again. For one side to win, the other has to lose. In trade, that is not necessarily the case. Both parties can (and often do) win.
Trade is a non-zero sum game, and the more you play this game, the richer you get.

https://econforeverybody.com/2023/01/06/oihr/

In that post, I’d used the example of why we as a family employ the services of a cook, in spite of the fact that I love to cook at home. Employing the services of the cook frees up my time, and so long as I use this time productively, I end up earning enough to both pay for the services of the cook and have a surplus left over in the bargain. The cook is better off because she has a job, I am better off because I earn more money as a consequence of paying the cook money, and so everybody wins.

In classes, I wait for this idea to sink in and say that therefore the idea that we should not buy stuff made in other parts of the world is wrong. That is, we as Indians should be buying stuff made in, say, the USA. Or Europe. Or China. Because if we don’t buy the stuff that we do from there, we must:

a) either import it from someplace else.

But we presumably weren’t importing it from someplace else because someplace else was more expensive (or of lesser quality, or both). So it probably leaves us worse off.

OR

b) manufacture it ourselves. But that’s like me cooking instead of the cook – sure I can do it, but because that leaves me less time to do econ-prof-things, I find my family’s finances to be worse off. Similarly, the opportunity cost argument applies in the context of India too. Manufacturing it ourselves presumably means diverting resources from other things that we could have done with those resources instead. So it probably leaves us worse off.

You might say that hey, us producing this stuff instead still does mean that we are producing something. How does that not leave us better off? Well, ask yourself why you weren’t producing this thing in the first place? If you were able to do a better job job in terms of the quality of the finished product, or in terms of being able to manufacture it at a lower price, or in terms of being able to utilize inputs more efficiently (or some combination of all of these things), why weren’t you producing it all along? Proof by negation, if you like. And that is why I say that it probably leave us worse off.

So, paradoxically, not trading more with other nations leaves us worse off.

Either my blog post on Friday and my blog post today are wrong, or we should be trading more with other countries in order to be better off.

Which is it? And why?

Trade Matters

Ashish3 Comments

If there’s one thing you should know about me, it is this: I love food.

Most of us do, I suppose, although I know people who are very much in – and very happy to be in – Team Eat to Live. But based entirely on a magnificently unscientific sampling exercise carried out by yours truly, I feel reasonably safe in saying that more than half of the people I’ve met love food.

But ah, not as much as I do. Me, I dream about food. I plan my day around food. I look up recipes on YouTube, read books about cooking food, read books about the history of food, watch food shows, and some of my best friends in Pune happen to be chefs at restaurants. Food is what makes life wonderful. Fact.

This is an obvious corollary, but I also like to cook. I should be honest and tell you that I am nowhere near as good a cook as I would like to be, but I get a little better every year. Some recipes are now definitely a part of my repertoire, and through a series of hits and misses (of which the latter are far superior in number to the former), I keep adding to to it every year.

But even so, we have a cook who comes home to cook our meals for us. Sure, sometimes my wife or I will take over the kitchen, but on a daily basis it is the cook who bakes for us our daily bread.

Which begs an obvious question.

Why?

Why, that is, do we have a cook coming at home to make our food for us when I like cooking and eating so much?

And my answer to this question is what toda’y blogpost is about.

The reason we have a cook at home is because paying the cook her salary is what makes us rich.

What allows me to type out this post instead of chopping up vegetables for dinner tonight? What allows me to read abstruse papers in economics to prepare for a class that I will teach today, instead of parboiling some rice? What allows me to curl up with a book on public policy, instead of kneading the dough to roll out some chapatis?

Time, of course. I earn time by paying the cook her wages. Because it is the cook who is doing all of these things, I have time on my hands.

What do I do with my time? Well, I write blog posts, I read abstruse papers, and I curl up with books. This allows me to get a little bit better at economics every passing year. Getting a little better at economics every passing year opens up new avenues to teach with every passing year. This teaching earns me enough money to live a comfortable life – and this comfortable life includes paying the cook her wages.

That is what I mean when I say that paying the cook her salary is what makes me rich.

Who loses out in the little “game” that our family plays with the cook? The game, in this context, is simply a way to refer to the fact that we pay the cook her monthly wages in return for the cook cooking our meals for us. Is my family worse off for having done so? I would argue no, for reasons I spoke about above.

Is the cook worse off for finding employment at our place (and at other homes in the neighborhood)? I have not asked her this question, but I feel reasonably safe in saying that she is not worse off. If anything, I would guess that she is better off because she has this job.

And so money exchanges hands for services rendered, but neither party walks away thinking that they got the short end of the metaphorical straw. We say thank you to the cook when we pay her her wages. And the cook says thank you to us when we pay her her wages.

Steven Horwitz speaks about going into a store to buy a turkey:

That turkey is not a gift, as the grocer gets my $9 per pound in return. It is instead a mutually beneficial exchange. We are genuinely thanking each other for having made us each better off. I am happier with the turkey than the $9 and the grocery store prefers the $9 to the pound of turkey. When we thank each other, we genuinely mean it. We are both grateful for the exchange.

https://fee.org/articles/the-double-thank-you-of-the-market/

Substitute the $9 per pound with the monthly wages of our cook, and substitute the turkey for the services rendered to us by the cook, and you will see that we’re both telling you the same story. Both sides of the transaction – in both cases – are benefitting from having been a part of the transaction, and therefore both are saying “thank you”.

(Fun question for you to think about: if you think Amazon is evil, does that make you evil too? This is assuming that you have transacted at least once on the Amazon platform, but then again, you almost certainly have, in one way or the other)

This is what economists mean when they say that trade is a non-zero sum game. Trade leaves both parties better off. Both parties in this “game” win. No one loses.

And this is a surprisingly counter-intuitive idea. Sports teaches us that for one side to win, the other has to lose. Sure, draws are possible in sports, but read the sentence again. For one side to win, the other has to lose. In trade, that is not necessarily the case. Both parties can (and often do) win.

Trade is a non-zero sum game, and the more you play this game, the richer you get.

And as I’ve said often enough on this blog, it is my deely held conviction that life is also a non-zero sum game – but that’s a story for another day.

For the moment, this lesson is more than enough for this blogpost:

Trade is a non-zero sum game