Ricardo's comparative economic advantage in Net age-birthed industries seems increasingly more hand-wavium the further away I get from intrinsically geographically-tied economic inputs like mineral resources, fresh water, salt water fish migration paths, or latitude-dependent agriculture, etc., and the further one transits away from historical network effects like Swiss watch-making, Silicon Valley software-writing, or Belgian diamond-polishing, etc.
The mathematical and empirical analyses of comparative advantage [2] [3], as well as great explanations about it [4], don't seem to address extremely complex goods with very high cognitive input factors, like semiconductors, industrial machinery, bio-pharma products, avionics, spacecraft, high-end electronics manufacturing, fracking, cloud services, search engines, e-commerce, etc., and I suspect comparative advantage breaks down as we evolve those and similar economic areas because ceteris paribus, there is no natural, lasting advantage one nation comparatively holds over another on human cognitive power (which I celebrate). In all those areas, there are leaders, but not so much and to such a comparative degree that they decisively elbow out other nations from economically attempting to enter those industries now or in the future.
The Sudan might be a cognitive desert right now compared to Palo Alto or Shenzen, but there is nothing structurally preventing them from turning into a powerhouse in the future (on a multi-generational timescale) to contend with, as say there is with them turning into the next corn-production hub like Iowa, or oil-producer like Saudi Arabia or the fracking Permian Basin.
I'm still not sure how Switzerland the geographic place intrinsically leads to more efficient watch-making, as Shenzen and other Chinese factory cities make copious use of établissage in many different industries. Also, Apple's offshored Chinese manufacturing demonstrates that extremely high quality hardware manufacturing is not ethno-culturally-bound, and can be successfully transmitted through a corporate culture.
Ricardo's comparative economic advantage in Net age-birthed industries seems increasingly more hand-wavium the further away I get from intrinsically geographically-tied economic inputs like mineral resources, fresh water, salt water fish migration paths, or latitude-dependent agriculture, etc., and the further one transits away from historical network effects like Swiss watch-making, Silicon Valley software-writing, or Belgian diamond-polishing, etc.
The mathematical and empirical analyses of comparative advantage [2] [3], as well as great explanations about it [4], don't seem to address extremely complex goods with very high cognitive input factors, like semiconductors, industrial machinery, bio-pharma products, avionics, spacecraft, high-end electronics manufacturing, fracking, cloud services, search engines, e-commerce, etc., and I suspect comparative advantage breaks down as we evolve those and similar economic areas because ceteris paribus, there is no natural, lasting advantage one nation comparatively holds over another on human cognitive power (which I celebrate). In all those areas, there are leaders, but not so much and to such a comparative degree that they decisively elbow out other nations from economically attempting to enter those industries now or in the future.
The Sudan might be a cognitive desert right now compared to Palo Alto or Shenzen, but there is nothing structurally preventing them from turning into a powerhouse in the future (on a multi-generational timescale) to contend with, as say there is with them turning into the next corn-production hub like Iowa, or oil-producer like Saudi Arabia or the fracking Permian Basin.
[1] https://www.watch-wiki.net/index.php?title=Etablissage
[2] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~rstaiger/Bernhofen%20and%20Brown%...
[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w17969
[4] https://www.pauldeng.com/teaching/intecon/IE_Fall2011_Lectur...