David Friedman's comment is still visible on "You mention my first...
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David Friedman's comment is still visible on "You mention my first book as one example of a way of changing the world. Let me offer a different example, from my own case. A long time ago, teaching economics, I came up with a particularly striking way of making the principle of comparative advantage intuitive. I pointed out that we have two ways of producing automobiles: We can build them in Detroit or grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how you build cars. To grow cars, you grow the raw material they are made from–wheat. You put the wheat on a ship, send it into the Pacific, and it comes back with Hondas on it. That way of looking at trade, as a technology for producing things, is true, intuitive, and provides easy responses to the standard arguments in favor of tariffs. One result is that it is one of the most quoted things I have ever written. The intellectual content is a lot less than in my book, and none of it is really original with me. But the cost of writing a paragraph is a lot lower than the cost of writing a book. And I suspect that paragraph, at second, third or fourth hand, has actually affected the views of a lot of people. So coming up with a particularly striking and intuitive way of making an argument and putting it in circulation is another approach to the problem." https://web.archive.org/web/20091014035639/http://www.adsavvy.org/how-do-you-change-the-world/