Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 4 of my late, great teacher Leland Yeager‘s 1968 book, The International Monetary Mechanism:

Low wage levels – the famous “cheap foreign labor” – are an inevitable result of the foreigners’ relatively low over-all efficiency or productivity, but they are also what enables foreigners to sell us the goods in which their disadvantage is smallest and to pay for our goods that they could make themselves only at relatively greater disadvantage. Low wages let the foreigners take part in beneficial international trade and so become less poor than otherwise. We also gain, even when trading with inefficient, ill-paid foreigners. Shrinkage of particular industries in our country does not prove otherwise. Shifting labor and resources out of our least superior into our most superior lines of production is a key part of the process of reaping the gains from trade.