Socialism: Sinister, Silly

Many of the conservative comments about President Obama I hear on the radio have been leaving me vaguely non-plussed. (If you think about it, it’ s not easy to be non-plussed in a vague way, or on the contrary, is it a redundancy?) Little by little, I began realizing that the cause of my non-plussness is the frequent allegation that the President is “a socialist.” Nearly always, the implied suggestion is that something sinister is about. The French side of my mind, well versed in things socialist, perceives a strong discordance between the two concepts, “socialist” and “sinister.”

First, the word socialist does not have a fixed meaning. In the past fifty years, it has meant just about everything, from German genocidal totalitarian (“National Socialist,” “Nazi”), to African plutocrat, to the mild high-tax administrations common in several mild and undoubtedly democratic European countries. (See my series of essays on this blog about various kinds of fascism.) It seems to me that American conservatives who call Obama a “socialist” are implicitly referring to the western European brand of so-called “socialism.” (Although, some of the president’s followers and entourage belong to the brass-knuckle brand of “socialism.”) Here is where the French fraction of my brain feels a discordance. As some of you may know, the candidate of the French Socialist Party was recently elected President of the French Republic. French “socialists” are fresh in my mind, count on it. Now, there is no way they are sinister, except by happenstance and only in the long run. They are not sinister, they are idiotic and deeply ignorant. They are ignorant the way someone is ignorant who has not learned a thing in fifty years say, between 1960 and 2010.

Recently, I am watching a French weekly show about which I have said much good on this blog in the past. (“On n’est pas couché.”)  The show subjects politicians to rapid-fire questions by a couple of sharp journalists plus some other show participants, sometimes for a long time. The guest that evening is the second ranking officer in the French Socialist Party. He would be number one if only the person who is now first had accepted a post of minister in the new President Hollande’s cabinet. Instead, she was piqued by something or other and went back to being Mrs Number One. The show participants want to know what will be the Socialist Party’s national priorities if it wins control of parliament in addition to the presidency. The speaker is acting in fact as a spokesman for his party and for the new president who has not really had time to organize his team. He can’t easily say the question took him by surprise. In addition to his position of authority, the speaker has the benefit of being close, of having been close for many years, to the elite of the Socialist Party. He is the ultimate Socialist Party insider.

One of the first priorities the speaker mentions, and mentions loud and clear, is a future policy of re-industrialization of France. That’s expected; left-wing demagogues everywhere agitate the rank and file by pointing to a far-away cutthroat foreign enemy who works for fifty cents a day and who has stolen their well-paid dream manufacturing jobs. They do it in Illinois; they do it in Pennsylvania; of course, they do it in France too. Now, I don’t know if France has lost manufacturing activity in recent years or in the past ten years, or in the past thirty years. I won’t even look it up because it’s not directly relevant to my purpose. However, if I had a sound chance to make a large bet with someone who could not wiggle away, or if there was an escrow situation involved, I would bet that it has not, or only to a very small extent. I mean that the value of French manufactures conventionally measured is higher in real euros than it was in 2,000, and also in 1990, although it might be a little lower than it was in 2008. Anyway, I digress again.

Mr Socialist Party Number Two is a very articulate person. He is the kind of voluble speaker who makes it difficult for interviewers to interview him because he presents a moving target. He answers every question at a fast pace and with 250% of the information another would deliver. He is a good tribune. He know how to speak to ordinary people. He speaks well with formulas that will stick to their minds. In fact, he is one of the few good speakers the French Socialist Party has to offer. Anyway, to make his point about the dreadful, lamentable and worsening state of French manufacturing, he offers the following figures:

In as little as the past ten years, the percentage of French GDP coming from industry (manufacturing) has gone down from 25 to only 17.

Well, percentage figures are not tricky in general. They are tricky however if you don’t know what you are talking about. Or if you are talking mindlessly. The Socialist Party Mr Number Two does not seem to realize that if your manufacturing sector grows at a 5% clip annually while your service sector increases by 7%, manufactures will account for a declining percentage of your production. In fact, any modern country would kill and even cheerily prostitute its head of state for such growth figures.(That would be Mr Hollande, in this case.)

To express the same arithmetic reality in a slightly different way, if both the manufacturing sector and the service sector grow at 1% per year, the manufacturing sector will not decline as a percentage of the total (as in his example). It will remain steady. Am I to believe that such rates of growth would thrill the Socialists? And if the manufacturing sector grows not at all while the service sector shrinks, manufacturing will become bigger in percentage than it was. And in that case, the French Socialist Party will have reason to celebrate, right? It will institute a second Bastille Day to celebrate the event! And so on.

Now, many of my sophomore students used to make this kind of mistake when handling percentages. But they were 19 or twenty on the average and they were not addressing the economic future of a nation of sixty million. And by the time I was through with them, none of them made that kind of mistake, you can trust me on this!

French Socialists just don’t understand the concept of economic growth. Their instinct tells them that the pie is always constant at best. That’s why they are socialists.

Now the man who is Number Two in the French Socialist Party bears the beautiful name “Harlem Désir.” He is a tall, lithe, elegant black man (but not too black. I know my French people exquisitely well; you can trust me on this too.) I am quite sure what a loyal French Socialist would say in his defense:

Mr Désir is not an economist. You are beating up on a kindergartner, shame on you! He came up through the Socialist Party on the basis of his leadership in fighting racism. He is a sort of people’s tribune. He is a very nice person. (I agree to the latter, by the way.) It’s unfair to expect him to know the ins and outs of national economic policy.

But of course, it was not the enemy, ex-Pres. Sarkozy, who chose him to be the party’s Second Mate. There was no conspiracy against the Socialist Party. No, this pleasant foo-foo head, Mr Désir, is a true expression of the party’s collective mind, of its culture. And following the show, no one corrected him; none of the hundreds of thousands of French socialist TV viewers said anything.

Do you get my main message? None of this is sinister. It’s a little pathetic. The French Socialist Party has taken charge. It will pull the country out of its grave economic circumstances with vigorous and enlightened policies that will also be equitable. It will save France just as soon as it begins to understand third grade-level fractions.

But French leftists don’t have a monopoly on stupidity, trivial reality reminds me whenever I forget. The morning following the evening when I heard Mr Désir, I am watching MSNBC. Of course, I am on the elliptical at the gym. That’s the only time I watch MSMBC, by force you might say. I am no masochist. There is pseudo-news announcement out of nowhere

Last year, CEOs remuneration averaged 8,9 millions dollars. (It might have been 9,8 million; makes no difference!) No comment, no explanation, and no correction. MSNBC makes me feel like starting a new business and incorporating it just so I can become a CEO and get even a small piece of the giant pie in the sky.

5/28/12  An afterthought: The failure of his presidency could turn Mr Obama into a brass-knuckle leftist. The danger is especially great if the Supreme Court overturns or guts his national health care plans.

Shipping Jobs Overseas: The Export of American Manufacturing Jobs and Lousy Education

Replayed October 27.

Replayed Feb. 13th 2011.

Replayed March 24th 2012.

Replayed June 7th 2012

Note (3/25/2012): The “comparative  advantage ” argument is important to the discussion below. The concept of comparative advantage stumps many intelligent people including some of my former academic colleagues I could name (but won’t). It’s a central concept if you want to understand globalization. I have on this blog nine consecutive essays dealing slowly and in detail with the issues of comparative advantage and of its implications. The relevant essays are easy to find because each has the word “protectionism” in its title.

I had a troubling encounter in the past few days. It was on Facebook and it was with a stranger. Here is how it went: I patronize several organizations’ and people’s Facebook pages, to stay informed and also to learn from them. There is a man, X, who is my Facebook “friend” and whose page I like because he is a libertarian, or a libertarian conservative like me, who knows useful things I don’t know. X has a talent for firing up debates on Facebook. In one debate a propos of I don’t remember what, one person, followed by several others, kept referring to the de-industrialization of America, its putative loss of manufacturing industries specifically.

I intervened calmly and politely to point out that there was no such thing. I remarked that the height of American industrial production was either 2008 or 2007, or maybe even 2006, not 1950 as they seemed to believe. I directed the debate participants to a couple of government sources. One woman responded almost insultingly, alleging that I was trying to send her on a wild goose chase. She appeared to think that I was referring her to the whole Census with its thousands of pages of documents. I took the trouble – obligingly, if I say so myself – to direct her through Facebook to a source I though was easy to read, NationMaster. In addition I summarized what NationMaster had to say on the topic.

Here is the summary:

The total value of the production of American manufacturing keeps going up except for small annual variations.

The woman on Facebook answered with vulgar statements including: “… just poop off,” “I don’t do stupid.” The vulgarity is not what troubles me, obviously. (I am a married man, I have heard worse and much more personal, including regarding the sexual proclivities of my forebears.) What disturbs me is her demonstration of furious obduracy. The woman felt so much out of her depth that she could not even begin to consider the possibility that my statement was correct, or at least, arresting enough to be worth looking into.

These tiny events struck me as a dramatic demonstration of the failure of our educational system. First, let me grant that it’s possible that the woman is not a college graduate, not even perhaps a high-school graduate. I can’t tell because her Facebook profile is masked and because, well, in general, I can’t tell. Her faulty grammar leads me to suppose she is not well educated. Her active interest in politics, as evidenced by her participation in political debate on Facebook, argues against her being very young. I am sure she is not an immigrant. (Don’t ask; it takes one to tell one.) I think she is a normal person with above-average capacity for self-expression. As such, she must have had some schooling.

I had already blogged on de-industrialization, by the way, on August 15^th 2009, “The De-Industrialization of the US: A String of Enlightening Fallacies; Essay On International Economics in Plain English.”

Let’s see what I think underlies her obduracy, her close-mindedness.

First, a confession: Finding and putting together figures on the simple topic of American industrial production over recent years is not easy. It may take an untrained person several hours. I blame the laziness of the specialized press for accrediting – passively – the false myth of American de-industrialization. I blame my Facebook correspondent for not paying attention when someone gives counterintuitive information that is both important if it’s correct, and verifiable. The fact that is is verifiable is an assurance of good faith. The fact that the announcer’s credentials are all over the Internet- as mine are – is another assurance of good faith and, possibly, of competence.

I blame the schools for three things:

1 Not instilling in people the idea that beliefs not backed by facts are worthless or dangerous because they lead to bad policies;

2 Not giving regular people the tools required to work through complex issues whose components are themselves simple. Craftsmen with a primary school education used to know how to do this not so long ago, as  with the problem of long-sawing an irregular tree trunk into well-shaped boards.

3    Failing to give ordinary people an understanding of simple quantities used daily in ordinary life.

Here we go:

It’s true that many manufactured objects ordinary Americans purchase used to be made in this country and are now made somewhere else. That would be true for most tools, nearly all batteries, and almost all clothing, for example.

Nevertheless, the value of American manufacturing went up about 4.5 times (four and a half times) between 1963 and 2007. (Nothing magical about these two dates, they are just a convenience. Any other two dates more than five years apart would give you a similar picture.) Incredible as it sounds, the value of American manufacturing production even went up a tad between between 2007 and 2008. I would not be surprised if it went down between 2008 and today. (Those figures are not readily available yet.) This small, short-term event would not speak to the issue of a trend of massive de-industrialization I am addressing now anyway. (Ask for the technical appendix for sources and for my treatment of the information I found there.)

The two facts above are not incompatible. In reality, they are predictably linked. That’s the way it would be in a good, productive, capitalist world: Americans are doing more of what they do well. Others are doing more of what they do well. Everyone ends up richer. Others have more money to buy what we still make. We have more money to buy what others now make.

We are all richer for two simple and connected reasons:

If I stop doing what I am doing badly (not so well, or frankly horribly) and I focus on what I do well, I will be more productive. I will earn more, as a result. If others do the same, we will all be more productive that is, richer.

Note that this happens even if greater specialization does not result in improvement of the quality of one’s performance. That will probably take place too, providing additional benefits

By and large producers in other countries have also specialized in what they did well. They have more money than before to buy whatever we make. That would be true if we made only one item, as long as others made all the things we and others need (clothing, batteries, tools).

But, US employment in manufacturing has been declining for many years. That is true and in no way incompatible with bigger production. American manufacturing keeps improving its productivity. (Productivity is the average value of production per worker, in this essay. There are other kinds. They are all rising.) Manufacturing is doing exactly what American agriculture did before. (Overall, American manufacturing probably has the highest productivity in the world. If it does not, it’s very close to the top. Not that it’s either here or there. This interesting fact plays no part in my argument. I am only testing your attention span.)

As a result of their ever-rising productivity, American industries (manufactures, I am using the old fashioned concept of “industry”) make more with less. “Less” includes fewer workers.

Employment in manufacturing has been declining steadily as a result of this increase in productivity: If one worker can turn out $150 worth of widgets in one hour when two workers used to produce only $120 together, one of the workers is gone. He is not needed. Of course, he and his family may well be pissed off. That’s true although everything they can still afford to buy is cheaper than it used to be.

Note what I have not spoken about: the “export of jobs.”

Manufacturing employment would decline if no American factory ever moved any part of its production overseas.

In fact, as we all know, some do. When they do, specific workers lose their jobs; there is no denying it. This leaves open two questions: First, to what extent is this purported “export” of jobs responsible for the shrinkage of industrial jobs in America? Second, do the same factors that contribute to the shrinkage of certain jobs also contribute to the expansion of other jobs?

The answer to the first question is: Not much. The answer to the second question is: Yes. I am not going to explain why here. First, you would not have the patience and second, I am only trying to convince you to think things through. I just wish to undermine determined ignorance.

Let me just say that my understanding of this complex issue leads me to the following policy position: If we stopped American manufacturers from moving any of their operations overseas, American unemployment would grow and wages would decline.

The impression of a de-industrialization of this country is further aggravated by the fact that many people don’t seem to understand simple arithmetic. How percentages are made is one striking example of this deficiency.

Imagine a small country where many young people suddenly start making children, for whatever reason. It could be new government economic incentives, or a shortage of contraceptives, or something added to the water. In that situation the % of old people in the population will decline. That does not mean the old are dying faster than before. They might die less than they did before. Here is another example: I have two jobs. I get a raise of 2% in one job and a raise of 4% in the second job. When that happens, the second job will contribute more to my income than before both raises took place. The percentage share of the second job in my income will rise. This does not mean that my pay rate on the first job has been lowered. It has only been raised: plus 2% more is more, not less. Period!

People keep hearing from the mouths of lazy or ignorant media personalities that services now account for 70% of the total production of the country, of its Gross Domestic Product. (See the link “Dr J’s List of Words….” on this blog explaining simply GDP and other economic terms.) That percentage is more or less correct. It does not mean that the value of manufacturing is not also growing.

The value of America manufactured products keeps going up and the value of services delivered in American goes up even faster.

This is pretty much what you expect if the country is prosperous: I can only have so many cars in my garage (manufactured product). After the seventh car, it all gets old. But there is almost no limit to how much I can use of some services. Services include plumbing, surgery, and education, for example. I have a limited interest in plumbing and only so many organs that can be replaced. So, plumbing and surgery are somewhat like cars and other manufactured products. However, I can absorb almost infinite amounts of education, another “service.” By the way, that’s pretty much how Americans have been acting: Education forever, at any price!

We have become richer in all manufactured products, including those we make and the many more we don’t make. We have become richer, even faster, in services. This country is no becoming de-industrialized.

Incidentally, if you look at dramatic upsurges in unemployment such as took place between Fall 2008 and now (Fall 2010), you will find that they don’t seem to have anything to do with the “export of jobs” or with anything in or around our manufacturing sector. Pretty much everyone, Left and Right, agrees that they are mostly caused by crises of confidence located mostly in the financial sector, more or less helped by government action.

The De-Industrialization of the US: A String of Enlightening Fallacies. Essay on International Economics, in Plain English.

About ten days ago, I began a lively exchange with a stranger, G., on the Facebook of the President of the Independent Institute, of all places. The I.I. is my favorite think-tank. It’s located in Oakland California. It’s my favorite because it regularly performs intelligently and usefully the function of bringing libertarian thought, broadly defined ,to all who are interested. It has been doing this for years and on a shoe-string budget. Full disclosure: I have had two co-authored articles in The Independent Review, one of the journals associated with the Independent Institute.

            You can easily Google the Independent Institute’s website.

My interchange with G. begun when I noticed one of the most common fallacies on one of his Facebook messages: He expressed himself in a way that led me to believe that he thought the US had been de-industrializing for years, chiefly to the benefit of China. We were both referring only to manufacturing industries.

       G.’s impression is correct only in the most trivial way. It’s wrong on the whole, very wrong.

        What is true is that American manufacturing employment has declined steadily for the past forty years. That’s true in an absolute sense. Fewer Americans work in manufacturing than used to.

This would have happened if there had not been any China, Red or otherwise. I gave G, the following historical precedent to which he did not respond:

Around 1860, about 60% of the American workforce was in agriculture. Today, it’s around 3%. (Note: Don’t go on a television game show with those figures. They are close enough for my purpose; that’s all.)

Nevertheless. American agriculture produces more than it ever has, in every sense of the word, whatever measure you want to use.

American agriculture used so much of the country’s labor power because it had low productivity then. (That’s value of production per worker.) As productivity improves, farmers can produce as much with fewer workers. What happened in the American case (and in Canada, and in Australia, and in Western Europe) is that farmers produced more with fewer workers. This virtuous trend has not stopped. It’s going on as I write. Some reforms may slow it or even reverse it; so-called “organic agriculture” may be one.

What happened early in agriculture happened later in manufacturing. Here are the simple, hard to believe, but nevertheless real facts:

Productivity in American manufacturing had never stopped growing, except for lags of a year or two. So has total American manufacturing production.

The simplest, most general rule-of-thumb is :

The year in which American manufacturing output was the largest in value, was last year, or the year before.

This is true although American manufacturing employment is declining and declining fast. Remember the 1860, 60% precedent.

I suspect G. did not get this point, in part because I did not explain it so well on Facebook. In part it’s because he appears transfixed by his own experience. G. is an experienced executive with manufacturing responsibilities. He says he is in China often. G. argued with me that the evidence of his own eyes was that a lot of manufacturing that used to take place in the US is now done in China.

I have no doubt that he is right, well, sort of right. Thirty years ago, when I bought an ordinary gardening tool, it was invariably made in the US. Nowadays, it’s invariably made in China, or at least, not in America.

My garden tool is also cheaper, much cheaper than it used to be. I mean in constant dollars, I mean relative to everything, including the minimum wage and including the median wage. It’s true practically any measure you want to use. My money goes a longer way. That’s what it means to be richer: Whatever money you have buys more. As a consumer, I have only gained by the fact that the production of garden tools is now very largely done in China.

That’s speaking as a consumer. If I had been employed in the American garden tool manufacturing industry say, twenty years ago, I might easily have lost my job. That would in fact have been a consequence of outsourcing.

This is not the whole story. The reality is more complicated. In brief, for every job lost to outsourcing, one or more are created by the after-effects of outsourcing. This is a factual but counter-intuitive observation I don’t want to discuss in this essay. Here is a brief way to deal with it: If you lost your job to outsourcing, nothing I will say will console you. I can only hope that the American economy is growing and flexible enough to provide another job soon. I hope it will be as a good as the one your lost. Looking at the past thirty years, there is a very good chance it will be a better job.

If the American economy does not offer an abundance of good new jobs, ask yourself why.

If you did not lose your job to outsourcing: see above; you are now richer than you were twenty or even ten years ago, the current crisis (2009) notwithstanding. If you want to know the net effect on American employment, a crude but legitimate approach is simply to look at evolving unemployment figures: In spite of massive outsourcing, American employment was very high until less than a year ago, (Note: Net effect= jobs added-jobs subtracted.) As long as unemployment is low or going down, it’s not likely that limiting outsourcing would do you any good.

Training exercise: The 57% of the work force who were in agriculture and who lost their jobs since 1860 evidently found something to do. The many manufacturing workers who lost their jobs in the past forty or fifty years ______ (Complete the sentence in your mind.)

G seems to refuse to consider any of this because he thinks his own experience an appropriate substitute for the kind of stuff I am writing now.

His experience is called, “anecdotal evidence.” It’s usually worse than no evidence at all to demonstrate anything. (It’s often useful to formulate hypotheses though.) Here is why it’s worse:

My wife beats me frequently. I deduce from this personal experience that wives originate much or most of conjugal violence. Furthermore, I know for a fact that my wife does not drink alcohol. So, I am pretty sure drunkenness does not play much of a role in domestic violence.  (OK, I am messing with your minds; my wife does not beat me, ever. She would like too though, and often.)

What happened with the transfer to China of American garden tool production is complex and factually well-supported, both. Fortunately, if you are busy, or impatient, or simply if you have a life, there are valid short-cuts to help you get a grip.

China, now India, and many other countries that could barely keep alive in the fifties are now producing. They are now finally contributing. This is good for me, for two reasons: One, the more goods there are worldwide, the cheaper they are, in real terms. Second, rich neighbors may sometimes be rivals politically, and even militarily, economically, they are all potential customers. The richer they are, the more I can sell them and, the richer I become.

As compared to 1955 today, the world produces all the garden tools it used to produce, many garden tools it did not produce then, more food than it did, more of everything than ever plus, it produces things that no one had ever heard of in 1955. That would include the low-end but amazingly sophisticated computer I am using to type and to disseminate this essay. Incidentally, there were television sets in 1955. Everything about them was awful and they were more expensive than the sets we have now. (That’s by any measure you want to use.)

Remains the genuinely important question of what industries are going to be in what countries. That’s an important issue because acts of production are not born equal: Making concrete, or steel, generates less in earnings, including wages, than producing software.

The short-cuts to this important issue are these:

1 Government seldom does anything right economically;

2 The issue of production allocation among countries is well explained by the Doctrine of Comparative advantage. It’s almost 150 years old. It’s well tested. It’s not unfashionable just because it’s old. Old explanations should only be buried when they have been demonstrated dead.

My correspondent, G., is obviously worried about America’s place in the world and he seems impressed by solar technology. In support, I suppose, of what he would like our government to do, he sends me an article about China’s policies in this respect. It’s at:

(http://www.facebook.com/l/;digg.com/u19LMi )

A sentence in the article caught my eye both because of its bad grammar and because it’s such a shining example of bad policy:

“China is telling their (sic) banks to invest in [solar energy industries].”

Two comments: 1 What reason is there to expect any national government, Chinese Communist, or otherwise, to make good choices regarding what industries should be developed? The Communist Chinese are the same gang responsible for keeping China an underdeveloped country for forty years. We now know it did not have to be that way. Yes, they are reformed but we don’t know how thoroughly nor for how long. Thoroughly democratic Western European governments have a long record of failures in deciding national industrial priorities.

“How about the Airbus?” Two responses: To this day, the invoice for this multinational government venture has never been presented in a transparent fashion. Airbus looks like an economically viable venture but we don’t know fore sure.  If you invest $10,000 to earn ten dollars ten times and you have to spend eleven dollars each time, your venture may sell a lot but it’s not successful.

Second: The Airbus project benefited by the Concord experience, an extraordinarily costly apprenticeship and a rank economic failure from its fist to its last day.

To my knowledge, the only large instance of a commercially successful government-prompted industrial venture is the Internet. It was done strictly on a cost-plus basis, as a defense project (another story), with hands-off by the federal government. (I would appreciate being corrected if there are other instances. Details and verifiable sources required.)

Examples in the negative abound. I will refer to what I know best. French governments have been sticking their noses into nearly all sectors of French industry since 1945. They had wide latitude to do so, because there were no intellectual defense of real, free-market capitalism in France until about ten years ago. French governments even intervene vigorously in the motion picture industry. (Read my wonderful article on this: Delacroix and Bornon; “Can protectionism ever be respectable? A skeptic’s case for the cultural exception, with special referenceto French movies.” The Independent Review 9-3:353-374. 2005.) French governments however never reached much into several industries, because they were too fragmented, or because industrial actors opposed a spirited defense against government intervention. Notable among those are the food transformation industry and the wine an spirits industry. Guess which French industries are more than holding their own, on the national market and internationally? (To begin, think Danon and think Gray Goose Vodka.)

G. also calls Chinese solar industry policies in a Facebook message developing “comparative advantage.”

It’s not comparative advantage. Like most college graduates and most MBAs, (and deplorably, most university professors, I suspect), G. misunderstands the concept. His mistake is not small, it’s huge. I think you don’t understand the logic of international trade and investment if you don’t get comparative advantage. Let me try because my readers are, by definition, an elite group.

My comparative advantage is what I do best. Period. It’s not what I do better then the other guy. If I suck at everything I do, I still have a comparative advantage because I don’t do everything equally badly. That’s always true in the real world.

The doctrine of Comparative Advantage is the single most important rational underpinning of international trade, and indirectly of international investment.

It says clearly and absolutely that if every actor focuses his effort in what he does least badly, all the actors jointly produce more than would otherwise be the case. Period!

Logic test: Is there a difference between: “What I do least badly, “ and, “What I do best” ?

Instant reminder: Once you know what I do least badly, in itself does this tell you anything about what I do better, or worse, than my neighbor Tom? This is a “yes, “ no” question. Don’t wimp out!

Below is a different approach to the same concept of Comparative Advantage. Select the approach that suits best your particular genius and stick with it.

My buddy John is an excellent, Mercedes-trained car mechanic. He is also an indifferent floor sweeper. Every time I catch him broom in hands, sweeping his shop floor, I bitch at him, “Stop, man; every time you sweep, you are impoverishing me.”

Am I right? I insist you already have all the information you need to answer this question. Again, don’t wimp out on me.

Facts matter but thinking things through slowly is also important.

There is a Muslim saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad:

“Ignorance is a sin.”