

Does It Matter That Amazon Can't Manufacture a Kindle in the USA? (yes) - jannes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/20/does-it-really-matter-that-amazon-cant-manufacture-a-kindle-in-the-usa

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tokenadult
It was decent of the columnist to provide a response to his earlier column,
which was much discussed here on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907187>

But if the comments he responds to in his latest column are the best he
received, and if he really thinks his responses are the best possible
responses to those comments, I have to wonder what the editors of Forbes are
doing both to choose such economically ignorant columnists and thus adversely
select for a readership that mostly doesn't think deeply about economics.
Steve Denning still seems mostly to write his columns to tout his latest pop-
lit management book rather than to encourage readers to think deeply about
economic policy. Again, I have to point out that the well established economic
law of comparative advantage,

<http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm>

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...](http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadvantage.html)

[http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Economicae/Essays/AB...](http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Economicae/Essays/ABS_Comp_Adv.htm)

aptly described as "one proposition in all of the social sciences which is
both true and non-trivial," shows that all countries, and all consumers, gain
if producers in various countries TRADE and exchange what they have a
comparative advantage--however derived--in producing for other goods that
other producers have a comparative advantage in producing. Americans own a lot
of Kindles. Many other Americans can afford Kindles if they ever decide to buy
one. The manufacturing workers who produce Kindle components in various places
around the world work in their workplaces mostly because they think that
offers a better trade-off of money for time than some other kind of work they
can do where they live. The world gains in prosperity year after year, both in
the aggregate and on a per-capita basis, because countries trade and because
enterprises decide what to produce based on what they can produce most
advantageously to trade for something else.

