{"id":312784,"date":"2010-02-12T11:21:08","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T16:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"tag:http:\/\/www.economist.com,2009:21004812"},"modified":"2010-02-12T11:21:08","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T16:21:08","slug":"harry-potter-and-the-gains-from-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/312784","title":{"rendered":"Harry Potter and the gains from trade"},"content":{"rendered":"

MATT YGLESIAS finds<\/a> another fun excerpt from the Economic Report of the President, in which the administration defends trade:<\/p>\n

\n

For example, the ability to sell books across borders certainly enhanced the income J.K. Rowling was able to collect from writing the famous Harry Potter books. Had she been able to sell her books only in the United Kingdom, her audience and income would have been much smaller. In addition, millions of American readers benefited from the increased consumer choice and the ability to purchase her books. Similarly, more Americans can work as well-paid aircraft engineers or manufacturing employees for Boeing or as technology specialists for Apple because those firms are able to sell on a world market. At the same time, it is distinctly possible that some American authors who would have captured a larger share of the \u201cmagic-oriented book\u201d market had there been no trade in literature were crowded out by Rowling\u2019s success, or that some handheld music device engineer in the United Kingdom has had to find another career because of Apple\u2019s success.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The enhanced market size generated by openness also influences decisions to invest and innovate (though it’s not clear how this applies to the specific case of Ms Rowling’s books). Innovation entails the absorption of certain fixed costs, which a business would prefer to spread over as many sales as possible. Thus the ability to sell a product to 3 billion people rather than just, say, 300 million, is a huge advantage. It’s a bigger advantage still for small economies, where costs might otherwise be spread over sales to just a few million people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MATT YGLESIAS finds another fun excerpt from the Economic Report of the President, in which the administration defends trade: For example, the ability to sell books across borders certainly enhanced the income J.K. Rowling was able to collect from writing the famous Harry Potter books. Had she been able to sell her books only in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}