3 Posts found for Author: Ryan Avent

[Adam] Smith saw things differently. Trade is not zero-sum, he wrote. Rather, trade increases the size of the market, which allows for greater labor specialization. Specialized labor is more productive than non-specialized labor, so that a world of trade and specialization, in which many people focus on one task and exchange their produce with others in mutually beneficial trades, is one in which everyone is … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Insight, Life & Society

People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subject: Economics | Economy

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society