I long ago wrote a diary on comparative advantage (you could call it a first stab at "the irreversible thermodynamics of free trade", the Ph.D. dissertation I will never write ;-) which was well-received...
Here are our latest discussions of comparative advantage. guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
It strikes me that I've read a lot about the mythic status of "Comparative Advantage" in connection with proof using simple game theory. Indeed, if you inspect the average college economics course you are almost guaranteed to find a very simple simulation set up to demonstrate how Comparative Advantage is real, despite its "counterintuitive nature."
(For myself I sometimes think that great play is made about the "counterintuitive nature" of Comparative Advantage in order to bolster it's mystique, but that is a discussion for another day.)
I seem to recall that you are in the simulation field to some degree at work. Would it possible to set up one of these "simple" demonstrations of Comparative Advantage, but add in movement of capital to that of goods?
Metatone, spell out the model you want to simulate in a diary, and I'll run the simulations. guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
Stanislaw Ulam once challenged Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson to name one theory in all of the social sciences which is both true and nontrivial. Several years later, Samuelson responded with David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage: That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them. --Paul Samuelson
