Irony

A form of the word 'irony' is often used to mean sarcasm or paradox or to signify an unintentional or unexpected outcome or even an outcome exactly opposite to the original stated purpose of an action.

Foe example is it ironic?

1. that in the Necklace..a story by Guy du Maupassant about a borrowed diamond necklace that was lost and replaced at great and cruel cost years later was determined to have been made of cheap glass.

2. that in O. Henry's story The Gift of the Magi, a young couple is too poor to buy each other Christmas gifts. The man finally pawns his heirloom pocket watch to buy his wife a set of combs for her long, beautiful, prized hair. She, meanwhile, cuts off her treasured hair to sell it to a wig-maker for money to buy her husband a watch-chain.

3. that the origin of the Taliban that provided support and haven to Osaama Bin Laden was fostered...even created... by US CIA support through Pakistani ISI to fight gaianst the Russian occupation of Afghanistan

4. that Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant. From 1935 to the early 1950s the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion as above, and the Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years.

However, it would soon be discovered that the southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control — hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, temperate winters with few hard freezes (kudzu cannot tolerate low freezing temperatures that bring the frost line down through its entire root system, a rare occurrence in this region), and no natural predators. As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953.

Infestation of Kudzu in the United States.

Kudzu has naturalized into about 20,000 to 30,000 square kilometers of land in the United States and costs around $500 million annually in lost cropland and control costs.

Yet Kudzu may prove to be an excellent source of cellulose a poetntial feed stock for celluliac ethanol.

Comparative Advantage

A common discussion of the concept includes this dissertation:

Adam Smith had used the principle of absolute advantage to show how a country can benefit from trade if the country has the lowest absolute cost of production in a good (ie. it can produce more output per unit of input than any other country). The principle of comparative advantage shows that what matters is not the absolute cost, but the opportunity cost of production. The opportunity cost of production of a good can be measured as how much production of another good needs to be reduced to increase production by one more unit.

Comparative advantage was first described by Robert Torrens in 1815 in an essay on the Corn Laws. He concluded it was England's advantage to trade with Poland in return for grain, even though it might be possible to produce that grain more cheaply in England than Poland.

However it is usually attributed to David Ricardo who explained it clearly in his 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in an

example involving England and Portugal.

In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less work than it takes in England. However the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce. Therefore while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth. And conversely England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a cheaper cost, closer to the cost of cloth.

Attorney example

There is an illuminating example illustrated in the well known book Economics by Paul Samuelson. Imagine a city where the best lawyer happens also to be the best secretary, that is he would be the most productive lawyer and he would also be the best secretary in town. However it is quite clear that this lawyer would focus on the task of being an attorney by employing a secretary instead of doing all the paperwork by himself. This can easily be explained with the concept of comparative advantage: He is the best secretary and the best lawyer, however by comparing what he can earn as a secretary with the income he could earn by running a law firm and employing a secretary one can clearly see that the latter option is the better one.

This idea that the absolute cost of producing a good is the relevant measure of advantage but the 'comparative' advantage.

However most examples are simplified because otherwise the complexity overwhelms:

Assumptions in Examples

• Two countries, two goods - the theory is no different for larger numbers of countries and goods, but the principles are clearer and the argument easier to follow in this simpler case.
• Equal size economies - again, this is a simplification to produce a clearer example.
• Full employment - if one or other of the economies has less than full employment of factors of production, then this excess capacity must usually be used up before the comparative advantage reasoning can be applied.
• Constant opportunity costs - a more realistic treatment of opportunity costs the reasoning is broadly the same, but specialization of production can only be taken to the point at which the opportunity costs in the two countries become equal. This does not invalidate the principles of comparative advantage, but it does limit the magnitude of the benefit.
• Perfect mobility of factors of production within countries - this is necessary to allow production to be switched without cost. In real economies this cost will be incurred: capital will be tied up in plant (sewing machines are not sowing machines) and labour will need to be retrained and relocated. This is why it is sometimes argued that 'nascent industries' should be protected from fully liberalised international trade during the period in which a high cost of entry into the market (capital equipment, training) is being paid for.
• Immobility of factors of production between countries - why are there different rates of productivity? The modern version of comparative advantage (developed in the early twentieth century by the Swedish economists Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin) attributes these differences to differences in nations' factor endowments. A nation will have comparative advantage in producing the good that uses intensively the factor it produces abundantly. For example: suppose the US has a relative abundance of capital and India has a relative abundance of labor. Suppose further that cars are capital intensive to produce, while cloth is labor intensive. Then the US will have a comparative advantage in making cars, and India will have a comparative advantage in making cloth. If there is international factor mobility this can change nations' relative factor abundance. The principle of comparative advantage still applies, but who has the advantage in what can change.
• Negligible Transport Cost" - Cost is not a cause of concern when countries decided to trade. It is ignored and not factored in.
• Assume that half the resource are used to produced each good in each country. This takes place before specialization"
• Perfect competition - this is a standard assumption that allows perfectly efficient allocation of productive resources in an idealized free market.

It is these assumptions that make application of a theory which I can understand in simple form impenetrable when applied to complex trade transaction that make up international commerce today.

Since these assumptions never apply fully or at all in any practical example, I would argue that other factors become equally or more important than comparative advantage and that the usefulness of the concept is essentially nil.

Arguments about whether international trade is inherently good regardless of other factors is founded on the basis of the concept of comparative advantage.

I would argue that the concept comparative advantage is only one consideration because the assumptions above have to be included in any analysis of a real world trade transaction and other factors that are not captured by the concept of comparative advantage...strategic over-reliance upon a particular market such as China...the impact of trade on domestic workers...the morality of labor conditions or environmental conditions may be more important than 'opportunity costs.'

Condescension

Dictionaries frequently define condescension by using patronizing as a synonym.... a construct which for me obscures meaning...what does 'patronizing' mean....condescension?...the definition is circular.

The description that I like as much as any is the 'temporary suspension of an otherwise consistent attitude of superiority or higher station of greater talent or finer taste etc in order to make another more comfortable or to confer sympathy or empathy and understanding.'

Does Hillary's knocking back a shot or Obama's bowling or, maybe more relevantly, Obama's discssuion of the bitterness of people who seek refuge in religion, guns, and xenophobia from the bitterness of their economic discouragement.

Here's a quote from a religious discussion: "The Reformed faith has traditionally spoken of God condescending to reveal himself in creation." This usage of the term fits within my most comfortable definition.