It’s Not Just World Trade — It’s Human Development

If you think of world trade as the exchange of products for money, its real power is the exchange of ideas to create innovative breakthroughs. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal story characterized international trade “as the most momentous innovation of the human species; it led to the invention of invention.” The editors suggest that the new buzz word is “collective intelligence.” They define this as the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural exchange of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. You will be amazed to know that the oldest evidence of human trade comes from roughly 80,000 to 120,00 years ago, when shell beads in Algeria moved 100 miles from the seas and obsidian tools in Ethiopia came from a particular volcano. What... Read More