RE: Productivity, Growth, and Trade: A Little Freedom Goes A Long Way
If products were priced in people/hours then your premise would be true.
Having an american machine a part @$50/hour is, in this paper's terms, less productive than a chinese use a file to make a part for $3/day. So, the american costs $50 and the chinese costs $9. So, the chinese is clearly better? But, if you compare 1 hour with 36 hours?
And lets compare toasters. The $19.95 wallymart special cost about $2 to make. That $100 fancy toaster cost about $3 to make. How do you apply more for less to that? Especially since, in the store, product design is everything, and product durability is nothing.
The biggest stumbling block to this thesis is that everyone has to be assumed to doing something that pays. In that case, the cheaper the better. But homeless people cannot buy televisions, even though they are the cheapest per size they have ever been.
An artist will spend as much time as needed to create their piece. And often the value of the piece will have no bearing on the input of time or resources.
eh, the benefits of trade don't rely on labor hour pricing; i've actually never heard of that before. It's all about relative advantage, labor cost differentials being one such advantage, but there are plenty other factors in production...some real, others artificial like taxes and regulations.
Also, the concept of a social welfare safety net is separable from any trade argument. Trade makes societies wealthier, period. Not everyone within society benefits, though, as trade adds competition which of course means some people in some businesses get out competed. Whether that competition comes from your neighbor or someone living across national borders is irrelevant to the process.
There have always been arguments against competition; that was the entire justification for the destructive guild systems in feudal Europe.
It would be better for society to refrain from forcefully limiting competition and simply providing some safety net after the fact to those that lose out, rather than forcing most of society to lose out by stifling the entire process.