Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 327 of the late Max Corden’s 1974 book, Trade Policy and Economic Welfare:

Trade makes new goods available to a country and so, it would appear, changes tastes and expands wants. In fact there is nothing analytically new here. The essential nature of the static gains from trade is that trade widens choice by presenting a country with a consumption-possibility frontier that differs from the closed economy one. The country can still choose the closed economy bundle of goods, but it can now choose from many more bundles than it was able to in the closed economy. If it is argued that the changes in tastes are undesirable, it is implied that the opening or expansion of trade may have adverse effects in terms of some kind of social welfare function that does not accept the primacy of individual choices.

DBx: Yes.

You show me a protectionist and I’ll show you someone who is arrogant. I’ll show you someone who believes either that he or she has tastes so superior to those of the bulk of most fellow citizens that he or she is entitled to impose his or her tastes on society, or that he or she somehow can divine knowledge, unavailable to others, about how to allocate resources in ways that will outperform the market at satisfying fellow-citizens’ tastes.

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Pictured here is W. Max Corden (1927-2023).