[extropy-chat] 'Unskilled jobs to go in 10 years'

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Hal Finney <hal at finney.org> wrote:
> You can't eat coins.  Let's suppose they are apples.
>  You start off with
> two people, an apple grower and a wheat grower.  The
> wheat grower gets two
> apples for a unit of wheat.  Now introduce a foreign
> guy who will provide
> a unit of wheat for only one apple.  So the apple
> grower switches to him.
> He can now pay one apple for a unit of wheat.
> 
> The net result is that before the foreigner came in,
> after an exchange,
> the apple grower had 1 unit of wheat and the wheat
> grower had two apples.
> After we introduce the foreign guy and do an
> exchange, the apple grower
> has 1 apple and 1 unit of wheat, and the wheat
> grower has 1 unit of wheat.
> Before trade, together they had 1 wheat and 2
> apples; after trade,
> they have 1 apple and 2 wheats.  Trade cost them an
> apple and gained
> them a wheat.  But wheat is worth more to them than
> apples (otherwise
> they would not have previously had a price of two
> apples per wheat),
> so it is a net gain, consistent with my argument.

Ah, but now wheat is of equal value to apples, since
they can be traded one for one.  And you forget to
account for the foreign producer's wheat and apple
stock: it isn't that the closed system became open,
but rather that the closed system now encompasses a
larger number of actors.

> > However, the more expensive wheat producer is now
> > free to do something else - like, say, refine the
> > one-coin-per-unit wheat into bread worth at least
> > three coins per unit.
> 
> And that makes it even better.

Again, that's what really causes wealth to be created.