October 11, 2009
Britain's Central Planning Death Panels
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Free Market M.D.
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Economies of Scale in Compliance
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Balan's Challenge
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The Pleasure of Telling Others What to Do
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October 9, 2009
More Scott Sumner
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Not From The Onion
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Thoughts on a Second Stimulus
In certain areas of agriculture we have no absolute advantage, much less comparative advantage. You could probably make a case that without subsidies that there are many areas of agriculture where we have no comparative or absolute advantage. I am thinking of Brazil's continuing strenght in soybeans in particular.
It might be helpful to break the list out a bit - much of the list seems to relate primarily to an advantage in risky ventures. Entrepenuership and leading edge anything appears to be characterized by a relatively high risk of failure.
I'm not sure we have any comparative advantage, for example, in trivial feats in software design or education - aren't we off-shoring software jobs because other countries have relatively good software designers as a result of their relatively good educational systems? (And its not as if our public high schools are reknown for their excellence). Similarly, I believe that some paralegal jobs are also being off-shored. It isn't clear why bottom-level attorney jobs (large-scale document review, drafting research memos, writing briefs) couldn't also be off-shored.
In the original thread on the article that preceded this
http://jrobb.mindplex.org/2004/03/22.html#a4466
An article was posted claiming to disprove the law of comparative advantages for a certain case.
http://tinyurl.com/yvg86
Seems scetchy to me, but i havnt worked through the math yet.
>>It isn't clear why bottom-level attorney jobs (large-scale document review, drafting research memos, writing briefs) couldn't also be off-shored.
State licensure laws would preclude offshoring of any attorney jobs. And lawyers aren't as common in other countries as they are here.
Damn, the only profession that we WANT to offshore, and we can't do it.
>>It isn't clear why bottom-level attorney jobs (large-scale document review, drafting research memos, writing briefs) couldn't also be off-shored.
State licensure laws would preclude offshoring of any attorney jobs. And lawyers aren't as common in other countries as they are here.
Damn, the only profession that we WANT to offshore, and we can't do it.
How do you "compete" in law?
I bought me some of that fancy Japanese law once. Worked all right in the shop, but I got it home and dang me if the enforceability hadn't gone out of it!
dsquared-- Delaware does a pretty good job competing in corporation law, I think.
Actually, by far the largest proportion of the outsourced tech jobs are the low paying jobs, including and especially phone tech support. That's not inconsistent with the US having some comparative advantage, at least at the high productivity end.
Brazil will be able to outproduce us in agricultural per se, however, they will do it based on argicultural technology (and human capital) developed in the United States. Many sons of farmers have come to the conclusion that owning a ten thousand acre farm in Brazil is more attractive than waiting around to take over the six hundred acre family farm.
Think of lawyers specializing in contract law as part of the R&D process of developing better means of trade. Eventually better means of trade become part of commercial custom. In this respect, lawyers specializing in contract law are like investment bankers, who constantly have to invent new products to replace products that have become commoditized. In a progressing free market economy, laws and customs, particularly those touching on property rights, are constantly evolving. As distasteful as this may seem, having lots of lawyers may be the cost of being on the leading edge of the ever-evolving process of discovering, testing, and implementing knowledge useful in living good lives.