What would life be like without exchange or trade? Back in 2015, a man decided to make a sandwich from scratch. He grew the vegetables, gathered salt from seawater, milked a cow, turned the milk into cheese, pickled a cucumber in a jar, ground his own flour from wheat to make the bread, collected his own honey, and personally killed a chicken for its meat. It cost him 6 months of his life and set him back $1,500 (It should be noted that he used air transportation to get to the ocean to gather salt. If he had taken it upon himself to learn to build and fly a plane, then his endeavor would have proved impossible).
Last year, he published another, far more involved sandwich-from-scratch video. This time, as well as personally harvesting and processing the ingredients, he built the tools he needed to create the sandwich and collected the necessary raw materials. That larger endeavor cost him $12,680 and took a decade to complete.
The inefficiency of making even something as humble as a sandwich by oneself, without the benefits of market exchange, is simply mind-boggling. There was a time when everyone grew their own food and made their own clothes. It was a time of unimaginable poverty and labor without rest.
The greater the number of people involved in exchange, the more beneficial the process becomes. This morning, thanks to international trade, I am drinking coffee grown in Latin America, viewing a computer screen with eyeglasses made in Europe, and typing this blog post on a keyboard made in Asia. Fortunately, over the long term, freedom to trade internationally has improved around the world, helping raise living standards and decrease global poverty.
However, recent trends have been less positive. In the United States, recent tariffs and other trade barriers have served to “drop the US from 56th to 76th place in the world in terms of freedom to trade and nearly knock the US out of the top 10 in terms of total economic freedom,” according to the Fraser Institute’s latest Economic Freedom of the World report. Critics put down trade by claiming that it harms the domestic economy and destroys jobs. Yet, there is a widespread agreement among economists that free trade is key to prosperity.
This morning, as you drink your coffee, take a moment to consider where it comes from. You probably would not be drinking it right now if it were not for trade. This video elegantly draws attention to the myriad ways in which the exchange of goods and services across national borders touches lives and helps raise living standards. Almost everything you use is the product of a complex web of human cooperation, often extending beyond your country. Even something as simple as a bag of groceries or a pencil is the end result of a “symphony of human activity that spans the globe.”
A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 9/25/2015.